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Software, 1970: Gerbils, Hypertext and a Computer at the Jewish Museum

In the fall of 1970, Jack Burnham's Software filled the Jewish Museum in New York with time-shared computers, a live visitor poll, the first public hypertext and a colony of gerbils living inside a robot's world.

October 23, 2026•CATALOGUE•

From September 16 to November 8, 1970, the Jewish Museum in New York hosted Software: Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art. Curated by the artist and critic Jack Burnham, it grew out of meetings the museum's director, Karl Katz, began convening in early 1969 with people from art and computing; the artist Les Levine suggested the title. Burnham was clear about what it was not. "Software is not specifically a demonstration of engineering know-how, nor for that matter an art exhibition," he wrote in the catalogue. It was meant to show "the effects of contemporary control and communication techniques in the hands of artists" and to let the public "personally respond to programmatic situations structured by artists."

The best known piece had gerbils in it. Seek, by the Architecture Machine Group at MIT, the lab led by Nicholas Negroponte, was a 5 by 8 foot structure in which a computer-guided electromagnet stacked, aligned and sorted 2 inch cubes, while a small colony of gerbils lived among them, bumping blocks and toppling towers. The machine's job was to reconcile what it remembered of its block world with what the animals had done to it. "Spectators seek out the popular gerbils," a caption in the catalogue notes.

Visitors were part of the material. Hans Haacke's Visitors' Profile used a teletype terminal on a time-shared PDP-8 to ask museumgoers their age, income and opinions, and projected the running statistics on a large screen; his News printed wire service reports onto a growing pile of teletype paper. Ted Nelson and Ned Woodman's Labyrinth let people read an interactive catalogue on screen and take home a printout of their own path through it, which the catalogue calls "the first public demonstration of a hypertext system." John Baldessari sent Cremation Piece: his paintings from 1953 to 1966, burned, with the ashes interred in a wall of the museum.

Coming 2 years after Cybernetic Serendipity in London, Software moved the conversation from machines that make pictures to systems, feedback and information, art Burnham called "transactional" and mostly "aniconic." An audience that writes itself into the work, a public record that updates as people use it, an artwork that is a set of instructions: much of what it put on the museum floor in 1970 now reads like the ground rules of art on the blockchain.

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