Read Before You Run

The first Read_me festival, held in Moscow in May 2002, led to the birth of software art repository runme.org. The site was launched in January 2003 with a database drawn from Read_me entries. Runme.org aims to contextualise and define software art and provide an exchange interface for artists and programmers. If you're not sure what software art is, this is the place to sample a wide range of projects with artistic approaches to software culture. At runme.org, you can access downloadable applications, bots, political actions, databases, code poetry, academic texts, and more. New and old projects can be submitted online, and the site has information about the next Read_me festival, to be held in Helsinki in May 2003. - Helen Varley Jamieson