“Computation as Material” refers to an approach that treats computation not merely as an abstract processing mechanism, but as a material for artistic expression itself. This means avoiding the fixation of a work’s meaning, claim, or interpretation in advance, and instead designing computational rules—such as neighborhood relations, interactions among multiple species, vitality, and the coupling of visual and sonic elements—so that change continuously emerges from their interaction. The emphasis is on a bottom-up, dynamic generative system in which the final form is not directly determined by the artist, but arises through repeated computation and the interplay of components.
This idea is also linked to digital materialism. Here, the computer is reconsidered as a physical material rather than an abstract logic machine, and computational processes are understood as leaving thermodynamic traces in the physical world, especially through irreversible operations such as erasure. In distributed computing environments such as blockchain, a work can exist not only as a fixed object, but also as code that is executed, recorded as a transaction, and sustained while changing state. In this sense, computation itself can implement artistic structures of self-transformation, irreversible change, and eventual disappearance.
Such an approach asks what kinds of expression are possible specifically because of computers, rather than despite them.