Why Is Everyone Suddenly Writing Digital Art on Everything?

Between Images and Systems

I didn’t make it to Lisbon for the NFC Summit last week. There was a strike in Portugal on Tuesday, which threw flight schedules into chaos, and I would only have arrived after the panel was over. I believe the discussion was going to revolve around whether NFTs should be tucked away at art fairs.

I’ve been wondering what has become of digital art since it also became a product on the art market. Things seem just as muddled there as the flights to Portugal during the general strike. For some, digital art appears to be whatever their friends on Twitter are sharing and selling as NFTs. For others, digital art is hardly worth talking about at all, because it has become so commonplace for artists to work with digital media that there is no longer any need to treat it as something special.

I briefly asked ChatGPT what had happened to digital art, and it explained to me that the art world likes hierarchies, and that artists who have entered the canon of contemporary art are not defined by a medium but by their ideas. Be that as it may, the market has decided that digital art should be established as a category of its own, even as some artists working with digital media have long been part of the contemporary art canon, including Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Jon Rafman, Refik Anadol, and Cao Fei.

On Friday evening, I attended a screening by Jon Rafman at the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Berlin. The place was packed. In his introduction, Rafman said that he had selected videos that show how the media he consumed shaped the way he sees the world. The screening felt like a doomscrolling session in the 1990s, before doomscrolling even existed because social media didn’t.

On Saturday, I visited Thomas Demand’s exhibition at Sprüth Magers while listening to an episode of the Anglofuturism podcast featuring Mat Dryhurst. The topic was Speculative Aesthetics in the Algorithmic Age. Demand first became known for reconstructing images that had become embedded in the collective memory as life-size paper models, photographing them, and then destroying the models afterwards. Mat Dryhurst, meanwhile, made a name for himself alongside Holly Herndon by thinking early and seriously about training data (Spawning) and deepfakes (Holly+). Seen alongside Mat Dryhurst’s reflections on protocol art and systems that generate images according to rules set by the artist, Thomas Demand’s exhibition felt almost anachronistic. While Dryhurst speaks about systems, Demand remains preoccupied with the painstaking construction of singular images authored by the artist.

Now, you might ask what is more radical, or more provocative, or more relevant today. Especially in light of the current debate around protocol art and the various attempts to define it. Dryhurst talks about this in the podcast. At one point, he argues that the people programming the rules and incentives of Instagram have a greater cultural impact than any individual posting on the platform. He says that nobody has disagreed with him. If that's true, it also raises the question of who we consider an artist today.

Demand stands for a generation of artists who still think of themselves as authors of images. Dryhurst, by contrast, speaks for a generation of artists who think of themselves as authors of systems that generate images. In the current issue of Spike (Everything’s Computer), I try to define this emerging figure as the post-artist.

At the Digital Art Summit, taking place during Art Basel week in Basel, I’ll be moderating the opening panel on Monday, June 15. Together with Jonas Lund (artist), Primavera De Filippi (artist), and Jordan Lyall (Chief Product Officer, Art Blocks), I’ll be discussing Art Before and After the Agent.

Incidentally, Primavera De Filippi recently wrote a very insightful text on the current debate around protocol art in relation to Strange Rules in Venice, an exhibition she is part of with her Plantoids. When I briefly chatted with her today about her definition of protocol art, she told me she has some very opinionated views on the subject. The rest, we agreed, can wait until we’re on stage. And perhaps by the end of the day—or at least by the end of the week—I’ll finally understand why everyone suddenly feels such an urgent need to write Digital Art on everything.

And a quick note on a few things I’ve written that have finally appeared in book form—or at least landed in my mailbox.

About a year ago, I accepted an invitation to contribute a short story to an anthology about dogs published by SHIFT BOOKS. All contributors were asked to select a historical photograph of a dog with a human and write about it from the dog’s perspective. In my story, a dog gets an AI implant, and then things get complicated between two best friends who don’t usually speak the same language. I am very happy that my first published work of fiction is also a love letter to my best friend, my dog Willy, who makes every day the best day over and over again.

Travess Smalley’s Pixel Rugs (produced by Vetro Editions with support of the Tezos Foundation) arrived in the mail today. With a foreword by Casey Reas. And an essay by me.

“As a person growing up between cultures and continents, I’ve been wary of strict definitions. Maybe, if AI is so poorly defined and always changing, then perhaps to be an AI artist is to fundamentally escape definition.” – Sougwen Chung, in conversation with me for The AI Art Magazine cover story.

And for SLEEK, I spoke with UBERMORGEN about the difference between a conceptual hack and rage bait.

Thank you for your time.

Take care.
Anika

P.S. Header image: AI-generated by Kevin Abosch.