AUSTIN, TX.- At the Blanton Museum of Art, Run the Code: Data-Driven Art Decoded brings together a group of artists who use software, live data, machine learning, sensors, and digital systems to examine the structures shaping contemporary life.

Organized in collaboration with the Thoma Foundation, the exhibition moves beyond the spectacle often associated with technology-based art. Rather than focusing primarily on the machinery behind the works, Run the Code looks at how digital systems can reflect memory, movement, surveillance, environmental change, and human behavior.



Across the galleries, technology appears not as an isolated subject, but as a tool for translating invisible networks into physical and visual experiences.

One of the exhibition’s most striking works is Madeline Hollander’s Heads/Tails: Walker & Broadway 4, a large-scale installation made from seventy-three salvaged automobile headlights and taillights.



Connected through software to live traffic activity at the intersection of Walker Street and Broadway in New York City, the lights respond to the movement of vehicles in real time. Red, white, and amber signals flash across the wall in shifting patterns, turning the rhythms of an ordinary intersection into a constantly changing composition.

Hollander, whose practice is informed by her background in ballet and choreography, transforms urban traffic into a kind of performance. The work gives visual form to the coordinated movements of drivers, vehicles, signals, and streets, revealing the complex choreography hidden within everyday city life.



A similar tension between physical form and digital information appears in Daniel Canogar’s Billow I. Created with a flexible LED screen, the work bends and curves across the gallery wall, breaking away from the rigid rectangular format normally associated with digital displays.

Images move across the sculptural surface in fluid patterns, giving the screen the appearance of fabric, waves, or a living membrane. By changing the physical shape of the monitor, Canogar challenges the idea that digital images must remain confined within a flat frame.



Refik Anadol’s Machine Hallucinations – Study I explores the relationship between artificial intelligence, architecture, and memory. The work was created using a machine-learning model trained on thousands of images of Gothic cathedrals.

Instead of producing a stable architectural reconstruction, the system generates a continuously shifting visual environment. Columns, arches, and vaulted ceilings appear briefly before dissolving into color and abstraction.



The result is less a representation of a specific cathedral than an unstable vision of architectural memory. Familiar structures emerge and disappear, suggesting the way images from the past are preserved, altered, and reconstructed through both human and machine perception.

Several works in the exhibition invite visitors to participate directly.

In Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse Index, viewers place a finger beneath a digital microscope that records their fingerprint and heart rate. The information is then added to a large, scrolling archive containing the biological data of previous participants.



The work is visually engaging, but it also raises questions about privacy and consent. Visitors willingly provide personal information in exchange for the experience of seeing their own body incorporated into the artwork.

That exchange reflects a broader condition of contemporary life, in which people routinely surrender personal data for access, convenience, or entertainment.

The consequences of interaction become more severe in teamLab’s The World of Irreversible Change. The work presents a virtual city that responds to Austin’s actual time and weather conditions.



Visitors can interact with the city and its inhabitants, but their actions may trigger conflict, fire, destruction, and permanent changes within the digital environment.

Unlike most digital experiences, the work does not include a reset function. Once an action alters the city, the consequences remain.

Through this simple but unsettling condition, teamLab challenges the assumption that digital actions can always be undone. The work becomes a broader reflection on human intervention, environmental damage, and the lasting effects of individual choices.



Not every work in Run the Code operates on the same physical scale. Some of the smaller screen-based pieces are quieter and require more sustained attention.

Siebren Versteeg’s Daily Times (Performer), for example, transforms the front page of The New York Times into an evolving digital abstraction. The work uses a familiar source of daily information and continuously reinterprets it, reflecting the speed at which news, images, and public narratives are produced and replaced.



Although more restrained than the exhibition’s larger installations, works such as Versteeg’s contribute to the show’s wider examination of how data is processed, displayed, and given meaning.

The strength of Run the Code lies in its ability to make complex technological systems accessible without reducing the works to demonstrations of software or engineering.

Visitors do not need to understand the programming behind each installation in order to engage with the ideas they present. Traffic becomes choreography, biometric information becomes spectacle, architecture becomes unstable memory, and interaction becomes a source of permanent consequence.



By placing technology in direct conversation with the body, the city, the environment, and collective memory, Run the Code reveals how deeply digital systems have become embedded in everyday experience.

The exhibition ultimately suggests that code is never entirely neutral. It observes, responds, records, transforms, and remembers. In the hands of these artists, it also becomes a powerful material for examining the social and emotional realities of the present.

The exhibition runs through August 2, 2026.