It is tempting to treat each new technology as year zero, a rupture, a revolution. The artist Jan Robert Leegte has lived through enough of them to know better.

That is the quiet argument running through our conversation with Leegte, who has been making art on the internet since 1997 and has now watched three or four “revolutions” come and go. Social media, blockchain, AI: each one gets declared unprecedented, but each one, in Leegte’s telling, is just another expression of the same underlying shift that has been unfolding since he first logged on. He compares computing to electricity. The current itself doesn’t change much. What you can do with it keeps expanding, in ways that still manage to feel magical when they finally arrive.

Leegte has been on both sides of the generational anxiety he describes. He stopped making art for two years when post-internet artists started flirting with galleries, certain they were betraying the anti-authoritarian ethics he had inherited from early net art. Looking back, he sees it differently: not a betrayal, just the field uprooting itself again, the way it always does. He watched the same panic play out with Web3, and expects to watch it again with AI.

That framing feels apt this week, with new tools changing how art gets made all over again, and new institutions launching or reimagining themselves. This week we report on how Serpentine’s Arts Technologies Team, which has been rethinking digital chronologies with artists and arts bodies around the world since 2014, are leading the way in the London gallery’s public-facing reconception of its archive, developing interactive strategies for polling visitor input on the framing, and language, it uses to tell its 56-year history as a nimble, tech-adjacent, kunsthalle at the heart of the UK capital’s Hyde Park.

We also publish a discussion between the curator Marlene Corbun and the artist Eko33, in which the latter traces his concern with optics, mirrors, and the infinite perspectives they afford, back through millennia to the examples of Euclid and Ibn al-Haytham.

It rarely feels like a continuum from the inside, in the moment. But that is exactly what it is seen through the prism of Leegte’s thirty years on the internet, Eko33’s embrace of ancient learning, and Serpentine’s marshaling and archiving of art of the digital era.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

Right Click Save’s Forum section is a discussion board for the digital art community. It has attracted posts and comments on a broad range of topics, not least on AI, its creative power and potential, as well as its perils.

This week, we feature an evergreen Forum post that chimes with a point made by the artist Jan Robert Leegte in an interview this week with Right Click Save: that the sequential emergence of “revolutionary” new technologies in the 21st century has in fact been a single technological transformation over three decades. In his Forum post “State of the Digital Arts”, Alex Estorick, Founding Editor of Right Click Save, refers to the three pillars of the contemporary digital landscape as described by Felix Stalder in The Digital Condition (2017): “referentiality, algorithmicity, and communality”. For Stalder, when considering referentiality, “Meaning is built through the act of referencing rather than the intrinsic value of an isolated object.”

The power of personal witness in Leegte’s case, serves to reinforce the contextual meaning that artists, curators and art historians can bring to public discourse by allowing a healthy reference to a broader continuum in cultural narratives, and avoiding the trap of seeing every new object, or new technology, in isolation.

The Right Click Save Index is a knowledge bank drawn from across the magazine’s editorial coverage. It shows how people, artworks, events, organizations, and ideas connect in our archive of more than 430 articles.

Rather than a comprehensive biography or dictionary definition, each page surfaces the salient elements from our ecosystem. Readers can access the Index from the navigation bar of the website, through the Search window, and from in-article “cards” that link to Index entries, or direct to articles in the Magazine archive.

This week’s story in Right Click Save on a new archive project launched by Serpentine, London, prompted us to use the Index to source and share a conversation we published in March 2026 with the gallery’s artistic director, Hans Ulrich Obrist, about David Hockney. The enormously popular exhibition “David Hockney: A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting” closes at Serpentine North in nine days’ time, on August 23, 2026.

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