We’re living in an age of anxiety, drowning in images, starving for truth.

This week, we published two articles that considered the impact of new technologies on image culture. First, Hans Ulrich Obrist, the Artistic Director of Serpentine Galleries, discussed a new display of David Hockney’s A Year in Normandie, a 70-metre-long frieze printed on paper and assembled from some 100 iPad drawings made by the artist en plein air during the Covid-19 lockdown. Then, the interdisciplinary artist and writer, Danielle Ezzo, traced a brief but eloquent history of “post-photography”, a term that has recently been applied to works produced with generative AI.

According to Ezzo, “…if the photograph could never guarantee objective reality, accruing meaning through layered systems of mediation, inference, and interpretation, then truth today only exists as a mesh of implied meanings, by virtue of its being embedded in training data and entrenched in the image-generation process long before it reaches the viewer.”

If images have always had an elastic relationship to the truth, then Hockney’s digital paintings revel in the poetry of implied meaning. Rather than forcing viewers to choose between trust and suspicion, they invite us to hold both at once.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

If last December’s inaugural edition of Zero 10 at Art Basel Miami Beach ignited interest from traditional fairgoers in natively digital art, Art Basel Hong Kong (March 25-29) brings the conversation to a part of the world where digital and AI infrastructure are already ubiquitous.

A number of the new wave of galleries and platforms that participated in Miami are set to return next week, with Fellowship and ARTXCODE presenting new work by Sougwen Chung, Onkaos exhibiting Robert Alice, and Nguyen Wahed showing Kim Asendorf, while the Berlin-based Office Impart is making its Zero 10 bow with a display of works by Jonas Lund. According to the digital section’s curator, Eli Scheinman, “One thing we’re trying to do with Zero 10 is give these hybrid galleries and exhibitors a home. […] This is not to denigrate the important brick-and-mortar physical spaces that many Zero 10 gallerists also have, but to ask what it is to be an exhibitor today in an increasingly digital world.”

If one of the priorities of Right Click Save is to establish a common language for critical voices from both the contemporary and digital art worlds, Zero 10’s conversation series represents a necessary seasonal meeting. On March 28, the magazine’s Director and Publisher, Tony Lyu, will join the artist Emi Kusano and curator Sunny Cheung in a discussion about “Who builds the canon?…”, moderated by Scheinman. With the tectonics of the art world rapidly shifting, their conversation promises to be a welcome temperature check.

Demos sees a “postcapitalist horizon of collective emancipation” emerging from “recent experimental visual culture, new media expressions, aesthetic practices, and social movement formations” rooted in the Black radical tradition, anti-capitalist socialist opposition, “chronopolitical diplomacy”, and Indigenous decolonial praxis. His analysis of a broad spectrum of practices, from the Time Travel Experiments (2017) of Black Quantum Futurism, through Cannupa Hanska Luger’s public artwork Future Ancestral Technologies: We Survive You (2021), to photographic documentary-fictions such as Arrival / Visitation: Cape Kiwanda by Super Futures Haunt Collective (2114) are representative of a vital genealogy of media.

— Alex Estorick, Founding Editor of Right Click Save.