This week, LACMA hosted a day of expert conversations on the conservation, preservation, and display of digital art, and Right Click Save was proud to be a media partner. The room was packed with artists (Rebecca Allen, Refik Anadol, Tyler Hobbs, Maya Man, and RCS contributor Zsofi Valyi-Nagy among them) alongside conservators, technologists, and curators who shared what it takes to keep digital works alive. The obsolescence of file formats as well as the restoration of code-based creations are not abstract concerns, but central to determining which works survive the decade.

Speaking of digital culture, this week we have devoted a special section of the magazine to a particular kind of digital identity: the non-player character (NPC). In partnership with LAN Party (Vienna Kim and Benoit Palop), we are pleased to be able publish three essays from their book, Non-Playable Characters (2025), that considers how behavior encoded into digital infrastructure shapes culture. On that score, Nora O’ Murchú examines NPCs as infrastructure, while Alex Quicho considers the untouchable NPC, and the book’s editors imagine the secret lives led by NPCs when no one is watching.

As ever, we will continue to foster dialogue about how to preserve digital worlds, as well as the lived experience of those who dwell therein.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

“Conversations on Digital Art” during Frieze LA set out to focus on the evolving landscape of digital art conservation, preservation, and display. In the first panel, a conversation between LACMA director Michael Govan and Rhizome’s executive director Michael Connor, Govan set the tone for the day with the idea of “slow digital.” When everything is moving so fast in digital art and culture, how do we preserve the past, present, and future? The subsequent conversations looked backwards as much as forwards, slowing down in the face of “upgrade culture” to examine what we can do to preserve digital media as well as the conversations happening around them. It’s important for us to think about digital art not only as objects to preserve or files to back up, but also, as Connor emphasized, as elements of an ecosystem, interdependent on the communities that make and maintain them. This is especially crucial given digital art’s precarious status on the margins of the mainstream art world.

One such community, spotlighted in the second panel, are art institutions’ in-house media technology experts, such as Mark Ayala (LACMA’s Manager of Gallery Media), Hannah Kirby (Tech Supervisor for Exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, LA), and Andreas Korte (Head of Exhibitions at the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin). To bring digital art, old and new, to life in the gallery space (life and death were big themes here) Ayala reminded us that digital art exists not simply as an abstraction—software and files—but also in physical form. Collaboration and communication between AV experts, both within and outside of art institutions, artists and their estates, and curators is key.

The third and final panel focused on “preservation in practice”. LACMA’s digital preservation manager, Joey Heinen, spoke with the artist Lauren Lee McCarthy, Linda Tadic (Founder and CEO of Digital Bedrock) and Stacie Martinez, director of Studio Daniel Canogar’s LA outpost. Tadic—who brought a “show and tell” bag of physical data storage formats, including a DNA data storage drive not yet available to consumers—spoke on the importance of environmental sustainability in the face of technological obsolescence. Overarching themes were the importance of documentation and the need to bridge the communication gap between digital art, film and television, the corporate sector, and third-party tech companies.

McCarthy emphasized the need for work not to be defined by its platform or technology, whether it be the blockchain or an early iteration of an AI model, and the importance of tinkering and hacking as more tools and APIs are closed off from their users. For McCarthy, documentation is important not just from a technical perspective but for our future selves to be able to “look back on and hold a different key to understanding what was happening” now.

— Zsofi Valyi-Nagy is a Los Angeles-based artist, writer, and art historian, and a Visiting Assistant Professor in Art History at Scripps College in Claremont, California

Repeat After Me II (2022–2024), a two-channel video installation by the Ukrainian art collective Open Group (Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, and Anton Varga) is on show at Nguyen Wahed, London, until March 3.

The piece, curated by Marta Czyż, presents two films from different stages of a war that is still being waged four years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The two-video piece made international headlines in 2024 when it was presented in the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The presentation at Nguyen Wahed has coincided with the fourth anniversary of the invasion and the continuing conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

In two videos, from 2022 and 2024, Open Group “gave the floor to war witnesses,” according to a statement on the artists’ website, “who were able to salvage their lives through their ability to recognise the sounds of weaponry”. The participants imitate these sounds of war and invite the audience to do the same. In the 2022 film, the participants are Ukrainians displaced from east to west Ukraine in the early stages of the invasion. In the 2024 film, the testimonies shift to an international context, with the protagonists in cities across Europe.

“This work may be understood as both a warning and a manual of specialised knowledge, which survivors of war pass on to their audiences—their potential successors,” the gallery says in a catalogue essay. “Repeat After Me II is a manifesto against all armed conflict, delivered in a peaceful form today.”

During an interview with Right Click Save about “My Frankenstein”, his new show of paintings at Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, made using proprietary AI as a composing tool, David Salle recounted conversations with his fellow artists Alex Katz and the late Roy Lichtenstein (1923-97) about the mechanics of painting. He also discussed his latest encounter with Jasper Johns’s “Crosshatch” paintings, which mark their half-century in 2026. The passages below did not make it into the final article published on February 27, for reasons of space.

“We see each other fairly often,” David Salle says of Alex Katz. “He is 98 years old, but he’s incredibly sharp. And we always talk about everything we’re seeing. And he said something to me about my work that was very interesting. He knew I’d been working on a series. [That] I was really deep into the process. And that it was a ‘lot’. He said, [and] I am paraphrasing: ‘You’re really good at the mechanics of a painting. And most people looking at painting, they’re not even aware of how good you are. And then sometimes you’re so good at the mechanics that it’s maybe even at the expense of the styling.’ What he means by styling, I think [...] is simply how the thing looks, the surface of the painting. The sum total of every visual thing in the painting is the styling, in Alex’s terminology.”

The conversation with Katz reminded Salle of a similar encounter with Roy Lichtenstein, “because Roy was also a compositional artist. He wasn’t a drawer. He couldn’t paint a likeness. He couldn’t make ‘the one thing’ like Barnett Newman [could]. But [...] he was brilliant at composing space, pictorial space. That was the focus from the beginning, and that was where he remained a master. And [Roy] said something similar to me: ‘You’re also a compositional artist. You’re someone who composes a picture.’ And what does that mean? Managing the relationships within the picture plane.”

Salle was moved by these themes to comment on how good painting actually works, “how dense and how complex, yet how just visually refreshing a painting can be”. For him, this is demonstrated by a loan show of Johns’s “Crosshatch” paintings, a genre first shown by Leo Castelli in 1976, now on at Gagosian, New York: “Between the Clock and the Bed” (until March 14, 2026). Salle knows the “Crosshatch” works well “but they’re still for me kind of touchstones of how someone can get thinking into a painting without any overt reference [to] anything except itself. They’re just brushstrokes but they have a gravitas and a sense of mental conundrum, let’s say, that’s so palpable. At the same time, they’re just beautifully decorative paintings that look great on the wall.”

— Louis Jebb is Managing Editor at Right Click Save.