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reflection of software (and software’s cultural significance) within the medium – or material – of software. It does not regard software as a pragmatic aid that disappears behind the product it creates, but focuses on the code it contains–even if the code is not always explicitly revealed or emphasised. Software art, according to Florian Cramer, makes visible the aesthetic and political subtexts of seemingly neutral technical command sequences. Software art can base itself on a number of different levels of software: source code level, abstract algorithm level, or on the level of the product created by a given piece of code. [6] This is shown in the wide variety of different projects ranging from 'codeworks' (which consist only of ASCII code and in most cases cannot be executed) and experimental web browsers – «Webstalker» (1997) – down to executable programmes. Just as software is only one of many materials used in generative art, software art can also contain elements of generative art, but does not necessarily have to be technically generative. Thus, the terms 'generative art' and 'software art' cannot be used as synonyms under any circumstances. Rather, the two terms are used in
different registers, as I will attempt to show in the following passage.
