On the Executable Work

EXECUTION

A digital work does not exist in the way a painting exists.

It is not present by default. It does not persist perceptually on its own. It does not remain visible simply by continuing to be.

Instead, a digital work must be run.

What we commonly encounter as a digital image, a line of text, or a moving form is not the work itself, but the outcome of a successful execution. Until that execution occurs, nothing is available to perception: instructions must be interpreted, data decoded, and output produced.

A digital work is closer to a musical score than a painting. It exists as a description of actions to be performed, not as a thing that merely sits in space. Without an interpreter (software, hardware, and display) there is no appearance at all.

This is not a metaphor. It is a structural condition.

A file stored on disk is inert. A sequence of bytes has no color, shape, scale, or duration. These qualities arise only when instructions are followed and translated into perceptual form. Every viewing is therefore a fresh enactment, not an encounter with a stable visual object.

This also means there is no privileged instance. There is no original appearance hiding behind copies. Each execution is real, contingent, and dependent on the conditions that produce it. Change the interpreter, the environment, or the display, and the appearance may shift—sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically—without the underlying description having changed at all.

In digital media, appearance is not stored. It is produced.

And because it is produced, it can only ever be provisional: a temporary resolution of instructions into perception, lasting only as long as the execution continues.

TRIAD

If execution is the condition of appearance, then no single component can be said to “contain” a digital work. What we encounter is always the coordinated outcome of multiple layers acting together.

At minimum, every digital work depends on three distinct domains: data, software, and display. Data provides structured descriptions. Software interprets those descriptions according to formal rules. Displays translate the results of that interpretation into perceptible form. None of these layers is sufficient on its own.

Data without software is inert. Software without data has nothing to act upon. A display without both produces nothing but an empty surface. The work emerges only when these layers align in time.

Crucially, these layers evolve independently. File formats change. Rendering engines update. Operating systems deprecate behaviors. Displays vary in resolution, color space, latency, and physical construction. The appearance of a digital work is therefore never fixed. This is not due to poor specification, but to the distributed nature of its realization.

This distributed structure is not a flaw or an exception. It is the native condition of digital media. Stability, where it exists at all, is achieved not through material persistence but through temporary compatibility between layers with independent lifecycles. What we call a “digital object” is therefore not an object in the traditional sense, but a momentary alignment across data, software, and display — one that holds only as long as those conditions continue to cooperate.

CATEGORY ERROR

Yet the language of objecthood persists. Digital artworks are routinely described as objects: images, files, tokens, editions. The vocabulary feels natural. It has the authority of centuries of art history behind it. Works are collected, stored, transferred, conserved, and displayed. We speak of them as things.

This language is inherited rather than structurally grounded in digital conditions.

The concept of the artwork as an object emerged from media in which material persistence was fundamental. Paintings occupy surfaces. Sculptures displace space. Manuscripts endure even when unread. Their identity is anchored to a continuous physical substrate that survives between encounters.

Digital works are commonly described using the same terms. They are said to exist as files, as images, as discrete artifacts that can be stored and retrieved. Yet the conditions under which digital media operate differ in a decisive way.

The mistake is subtle. It does not arise from carelessness, but from analogy. Because digital works can be named, collected, and transferred, we assume they must also exist as objects—a structural misclassification. Calling digital works “objects” is not merely imprecise. It is a category error: the application of a material ontology to a medium whose primary mode of existence is execution.

INTERFACE

If execution is the condition of appearance, then the stability we associate with digital “objects” cannot come from the medium itself. It must be produced elsewhere. In practice, it is produced by interfaces.

Modern computing environments are designed to conceal execution by collapsing process into appearance. Files appear as icons. Thumbnails stand in for rendered outcomes. Double-clicking a document feels like revealing something already present, rather than initiating a chain of interpretation and rendering. The system presents execution as if it were retrieval rather than performance.

This is not accidental. It is the result of decades of interface design aimed at reducing cognitive friction. Early personal computing made execution explicit: software and data were often stored on separate physical media; loading a program involved audible mechanical activity, visible delays, and repeated user intervention. Execution was clearly staged as a prerequisite to action. Contemporary systems invert this relationship. Execution is made silent, instantaneous, and automatic. The labor of interpretation is pushed below the threshold of awareness.

The file metaphor plays a central role in masking contingency. Files are presented as discrete, self-contained units, visually stable and spatially locatable. Icons and previews suggest that the work resides inside the file, waiting to be revealed. In reality, the file contains no image, sound, or form — only structured data awaiting interpretation. What appears on screen is the result of execution performed by software and hardware operating beyond the interface’s visible frame.

Interfaces therefore do not merely organize digital media; they naturalize a false ontology.

By making execution invisible, they encourage us to treat digital works as if they were objects that persist, rather than processes that recur. The smoother the interface, the more complete the illusion.

This illusion continues because it enables intuitive interaction at scale. That ease carries a conceptual cost. When execution is hidden, contingency disappears from view. Variability is mistaken for error. Dependency is mistaken for permanence.

What the interface presents as a visible object is, in fact, a stabilized performance—one that only appears object-like because the conditions that produce it have been carefully designed to remain unseen.

IMAGE

This becomes especially clear in the case of image files. It is tempting to treat an image file as a picture that happens to be stored digitally. The familiarity of photographs, screenshots, and thumbnails encourages this assumption. But image formats do not store images in the perceptual sense. They store structured descriptions that must be interpreted in order to produce an image at all.

A JPEG or PNG is not a visible image frozen in place. It is a compressed, encoded instruction set that specifies how an image should be reconstructed when decoded by software. Color values, spatial relationships, and tonal transitions are not directly present; they are derived through execution. What appears on screen is the result of a decoding process carried out at the moment of viewing, not a latent picture waiting inside the file.

In lossy formats such as JPEG, this indeterminacy is further intensified by perceptual compression. Information judged visually negligible is deliberately discarded at export, meaning the file does not specify a uniquely recoverable image, but only an approximation deemed acceptable to human vision. The “same” JPEG may therefore resolve differently depending on decoder implementation, quality settings, or future standards, without any change to the underlying data.

Even when compression is lossless (PNG, TIFF, etc.), appearance remains contingent. Identical image data can produce visibly different results depending on how it is rendered. A low-resolution image enlarged using nearest-neighbor interpolation appears crisp and block-like; the same image smoothed through bilinear or bicubic interpolation appears soft and blended. These decisions are not contained in the file. They are made at execution time by software and display systems operating under their own priorities.

What this reveals is not a failure of image formats, but a structural condition of digital media. The visible image is not the work itself; it is the outcome of interpretation under particular rules. The file does not contain a picture in waiting. It contains a description capable of being enacted.

A JPEG therefore cannot meaningfully be identified as “the artwork itself.” It is one component in an execution chain—necessary, standardized, and widely interoperable, but insufficient. The work appears only when its instructions are successfully realized into perception, and disappears again when that process ends.

TRANSPARENCY

At this point, it may seem that this account applies primarily to images. If compressed photographs and graphics require decoding and rendering, perhaps simpler digital forms fare better. Plain text documents and common word-processing files are often treated as near-exceptions—formats that appear to present their contents directly, without translation. But this intuition does not hold.

A text file does not contain letters in any perceptual sense. It contains numeric codes that must be interpreted according to a character encoding. Those codes acquire visible form only when mapped to glyphs, arranged by a layout engine, and rendered using a particular font on a particular display context. Change the encoding, substitute the font, alter spacing rules, resize a window, or view the same document on a different system, and its appearance shifts—even when its stored contents remain unchanged.

The same is true of formatted documents. A word processor file does not contain the visible page it seems to present. It contains instructions describing structure, styling, spacing, and pagination, all of which must be resolved by software before they appear. What looks like a stable sheet of text is the outcome of interpretation performed at the moment of viewing.

In every case, what appears is not what is stored. No digital format directly contains its own perceptual form. Appearance always arrives through interpretation.

There is therefore no digital medium that “looks like what it is” in the way a physical object appears to.

Execution cannot be bypassed.

It can only be made quieter.

Moving and interactive works do not contradict this account; they make it explicit. Motion, looping, and responsiveness foreground execution by refusing the stillness that allows static images to masquerade as objects.

This closes off a common escape route. The problem is not that digital works are badly specified. It is that specification alone never produces appearance. What remains is not an object, but a recurring event.

ORIGINALITY

Once the digital work is understood as a recurring event rather than a persistent object, originality can no longer be anchored to material continuity.

What digital works offer is not an original object, but repeatable singularity. Each execution is singular in time, context, and conditions, yet none is ontologically prior to the others. Identity does not reside in a first appearance or an authentic instance, but in the capacity for enactment itself.

This requires a different understanding of originality. It cannot mean “the first appearance,” because there is no appearance that persists between executions. Nor can it mean “the authentic instance,” because authenticity presupposes material continuity. What remains consistent is not a surface or a file, but a rule set and the conditions under which it is realized.

This marks a structural break from material art. In painting or sculpture, originality is anchored to persistence. A work occupies a specific surface that endures through time. Copies remain distinguishable by their distance from a materially continuous source. Even mechanical reproduction presupposes such a source.

Digital works have no equivalent substrate; what appears on screen is produced anew each time. Execution does not move an appearance further from an origin because there is no originating appearance to move away from.

For this reason, the language of copies fails. When a file is duplicated, nothing resembling an image, sound, or form is transferred. What is copied is a description. Each execution that follows is a fresh realization under contemporary conditions, not a reproduction of a prior appearance. Identity is derived from process, not lineage.

This places digital media beyond the framework of mechanical reproduction. Mechanical reproduction multiplies appearances from a persistent source. Digital execution multiplies appearances without a source appearance at all. Aura does not decay because there is nothing stable from which it could decay.

In digital art, there is no object to protect from duplication. There is only a process to be enacted again.

DEPENDENCY

If there is no stable object to protect, what remains is not immateriality, but dependency. The absence of a persistent perceptual substrate does not imply independence. Digital works do not float free of material conditions; they rest on a different kind of foundation.

Digital works are often described as lightweight or self-contained. In reality, they rely on vast dependency graphs: operating systems, runtimes, libraries, protocols, compilers, drivers, hardware architectures, and energy infrastructure. What appears as a discrete file is the visible tip of an extended technical stack whose stability cannot be assumed.

These dependencies are themselves embedded in evolving language systems subject to revision, deprecation, and abandonment. APIs change. Standards shift. Platforms disappear. The relationships are too numerous and interlinked to be understood as a list; they form a network of engineered conditions that must remain aligned for execution to occur.

Physical artifacts also require conditions for experience—light, proximity, a sensing body—but these are not conditions of their existence. A sculpture remains a sculpture in the dark. Digital works admit no such separation. The conditions that make them perceptible are the same conditions that make them exist at all.

This distinction matters. A physical object may persist unwitnessed. A digital work does not persist in reserve. When execution ceases—when its environment no longer functions—the work does not retreat into invisibility. It collapses.

Physical objects rely on cosmic conditions.
Digital objects rely on engineered conditions.

MAINTENANCE

Engineered conditions do not age in the way materials do. Physical decay announces itself. Rust spreads. Paper yellows. Stone erodes. Time registers materially, allowing deterioration to be seen and addressed. Preservation responds to visible change.

Digital decay operates differently. Contemporary systems mask material degradation through redundancy, error correction, and replication, but this concealment introduces a new fragility. A work may appear perfectly intact while the technical environment required for its execution drifts beyond compatibility. Failure is rarely gradual. Systems function until they do not.

This produces an inversion. In physical media, decay is visible and maintenance is reactive. In digital media, decay is latent and maintenance must be continuous. Preservation anticipates collapse rather than repairing damage.

For this reason, ephemerality misnames the problem. Ephemeral objects fade. Digital works do not fade. They fail. Their disappearance is not erosion but the termination of execution. A work that ran yesterday may not run tomorrow, not because it changed, but because its conditions did.

Standards and open formats extend viability, but they do not eliminate contingency. Longevity remains dependent on interpreters, platforms, energy, and institutional commitment. Stability is sustained, not inherent.

Digital preservation therefore cannot mean fixing an object in place. What must be preserved is the capacity for reenactment: the ability to reconstruct environments and restore the conditions under which execution remains possible.

Maintenance becomes the work’s shadow medium. When it succeeds, nothing appears to happen. When it fails, everything disappears.

Digital works do not decay into fragments. They vanish into non-execution.

INSTITUTIONS

Frameworks designed for persistent artifacts falter when faced with executable works. Traditional art history is organized around stable artifacts. It classifies works by material, location, provenance, and transformation over time. Conservation presumes a substrate that persists. Documentation supplements the object but does not replace it. Preservation seeks to slow change.

Execution-based digital works invert these assumptions. This inversion is most visible in works that foreground systems or variability, but it applies equally to static images and documents.

The primary entity is not a stable artifact but an executable structure. What appears is contingent on environment, version, and context. The conditions that make the work visible are inseparable from the work itself.

This produces immediate tension within institutional frameworks. Museums are built to collect, store, and conserve objects. Digital works require environments, dependencies, and ongoing technical alignment. A screenshot cannot stand in as a conserved original; it is a different artifact entirely. A video recording is documentation, not preservation.

The difficulty is not resistance to innovation. It is structural mismatch. Art history evolved around materials that persist independently of their conditions of display. Digital works do not.

When institutions attempt to treat executable systems as fixed artifacts, something essential is lost. Either the work is reduced to documentation, or its execution environment is frozen in ways that arrest its native dynamism.

The problem is not that digital art resists categorization. It is that the categories themselves were designed for a different ontological regime.

CONCLUSION

Digital artworks occur as events under specific conditions. What appears on a screen is the temporary resolution of instructions into perception. When execution ceases, nothing remains perceptually in reserve.

This does not make digital art immaterial, nor does it make it unreal. It makes it conditional. Its identity is anchored not in material singularity but in executable structure. What persists is not a surface but a description capable of being enacted again.

To continue speaking of digital works as objects is to import a framework designed for matter into a medium defined by interpretation. The resulting confusion is not philosophical excess; it is structural misclassification.

Once this is acknowledged, several assumptions fall away. Originality cannot mean first appearance. Preservation cannot mean freezing a thing in place. Documentation cannot stand in for the work itself. What replaces these assumptions is not loss, but reorientation.

Digital art demands a shift from object-thinking to execution-thinking. It asks us to recognize that appearance, in this medium, is never self-grounding.

Not a relic to be preserved, but a process to be enacted. In the digital realm, appearance is not merely misleading. It is structurally deceptive.