Welcome to the second edition of our new-look newsletter, where we aim to capture compelling signals from the intersection of art and technology: whether it’s the evolution of digital art in the arc of Mario Klingemann’s practice or Samia Halaby’s work on show at Penn Station, New York, as part of MoMA at Moynihan.

Toledo, Ohio has become a center for cross-disciplinary connections in recent months thanks to the success of “Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms” at the Toledo Museum of Art, which traces a history of generative systems from the 1960s to now. A newly installed, Monet-inspired Transient Bloom—the latest digital-to-physical interactive video sculpture from Mike Winkelmann (Beeple)—is also on show at the museum until February 22nd. While last week’s launch of a new exhibition, “The Assembly Line”, also in Toledo, has united digital and traditional artists, reinforcing the city as a hub for hybrid creativity.

This convergence of worlds feels like a watershed moment when old borders between digital and analog media aren’t just getting blurry—they’re actually becoming channels for creative conversations.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at RCS

The nine-day group exhibition “The Assembly Line”, in a pop-up gallery in the warehouse district of downtown Toledo, curated by Raina Marie Valentine and Justin Gilanyi, features the work of a compelling line-up of emerging, established, and historic artists. Exploring the conjunction of the analog and the digital, the show includes work by 12 practitioners: AA Murakami, Gretchen Andrew, Botto, Bruce Conner, Charles Csuri, Harold Cohen, Steve Dana, Dan Hernandez, David Paul Kay, Yusuf Dubois Abdul Lateef, LoVid, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Adam Pendleton, Anne Spalter, Richard Tuttle, and Irene Was.

The New York-based Palestinian artist Samia Halaby has received the 2025 MUNCH Award, a prize set up by MUNCH museum, Oslo, in 2024 to recognise artistic courage and integrity. Halaby will receive the award at the museum on 24 October. In a statement, the award’s jury said that it wished to mark Halaby’s “visionary and enduring artistic practice. She was at the forefront of the development of digital art through her experiments with early computer animation, and has been exploring abstraction in its different forms for over 60 years … As an activist, she has been organizing for causes concerning class, race, and Palestine since the 1970s. Halaby has been a vocal critic of censorship in the arts for decades, which she herself has faced, and overcome.”

The writer, curator, and academic Jesse Damiani brings the same sense-making logic to his Urgent Futures Podcast—where he goes deep with writers and teachers on what he terms the “polycrisis … an umbrella term for the interconnected and self-reinforcing crises of our time, from climate change to inequality”—as he does to his thoughtful takes on art history. In a memorable 2023 essay for Right Click Save, “Curating in Postreality”, Damiani writes that “the curator’s first objective in Postreality is to engage critically with domains of knowledge beyond the arts, to develop interdisciplinary expertise by which to evaluate the qualities of a given work or object through multiple lenses”.

“I've always been fascinated with how we communicate—particularly through art, storytelling, and media—and what that might tell us about emerging realities,” he tells Right Click Save. “In 2020, I launched a newsletter, Reality Studies, to explore these topics, and I’ve been lucky to learn from leading artists, curators, and theorists along the way. As I got deeper into the work, my curiosity led me to the broader issue of the polycrisis...”

“The Urgent Futures Podcast is the little home I’ve created for these conversations. They’re not always the cheeriest dialogues, but in an odd way they help me feel saner; though our realities are in many ways getting scarier… I know my path might seem a bit windy, but where it all fits together for me is that art, language, and storytelling are at the epicenter of the polycrisis. They are perhaps the most vital tools we have for translating complexity and galvanizing collective action.”