The Unexpected Philosophical Depths of the Clicker Game Universal Paperclips

On a less-trafficked floor of the Whitney Museum, curators have scoured the museum's permanent collection to display art that uses "instructions, sets of rules, and code" to investigate a world "increasingly driven by automated systems." In the nineties, the game designer Frank Lantz produced such work. "I would make some marks on a page, and then I would just connect the endpoints of all the lines to the nearest unconnected endpoint, and then I would add another rule," he said. His method had a whiff of misanthropy. He wanted to render himself obsolete and let something else take over. "I was trying to understand--where does drawing come from?