This week, we published a three-article series by distinguished computer scientist and son of the artist Harold Cohen, Paul Cohen, that questions the language applied to art made with computational systems. Together, these essays constitute a rigorous but accessible interrogation of such familiar “skunks” as aesthetic, autonomy, collaboration, and creativity.

In “The Trouble with Terminology”, Cohen asserts that artists are the most qualified people to define the language of digital art because they are the closest to what programs actually do. As a magazine that has always sought to use to the language of artists—rather than a class of intervening tastemakers—to evaluate art, this approach cuts to the core of Right Click Save’s mission.

Where today’s deep learning algorithms have often been criticized for precipitating an age of AI slop, Cohen’s essays on creativity and his father’s Freehand Line Algorithm highlight the vital importance of “dialog between program and programmer”, and between human and machine, to the future of digital art. They also prove that, in an age of large language models, words matter more than ever.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

In a recent post, “Sentiment Is the Last Liquid Market | On rage quitting, guilt collecting, and what $138 million lows do to a community’s critical faculties”, Museum Ghost (Joana Kawahara Lino) offered a thoughtful corrective to recent social media discourse. Her subject was the community’s failure to take the time to offer an art-critical framing of the decision by an artist, Lamia Eda, to announce that she was leaving the NFT space.

A collector had bought one of Eda’s works as a form of amends for the copy-meme heat that Eda’s exit post had received on X. This, Museum Ghost wrote, without criticizing the collector’s intentions, “makes [Lamia Eda] the recipient of a settlement rather than the subject of genuine critical attention. That is a subtler diminishment than the meme that preceded it”. Museum Ghost’s intention, she noted in a subsequent exchange on X, was not to analyze any individual’s behavior, but to show an interest in “what structures make certain behaviors the path of least resistance”.

The digital art marketplaces SuperRare and objkt have joined forces to host a Digital Art Festival at Offline Gallery in New York. The festival opens on April 16 with Sasha Stiles presenting a curated selection from A Living Poem, shown recently on the Digital Wall at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), followed by a solo show from Osinachi and a group exhibition spotlighting the emerging digital artists Yudho, Sares, Robinson St. George, Perfectl00p, Tiggarton, Macbeth, Neurocolor, Iness Rychlik, and Vestica.

The Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University, New York State, is presenting two new digital art exhibitions in April 2026. Both ”Ctrl+Alt+Dream: Surrealism Then and Now” (April 7 to July 26, 2026) and ”Hardwired: Foundational Works in Digital Art” (April 22, 2026 to January 9, 2028) draw on the museum’s permanent collection of landmark works of digital and Minimalist art.

Genealogists of digital art can look forward to an instructive double-layer cake of art made with technology in All Impossible Deeds: A Report on the LACMA Art + Technology Lab, 2014–2025 (2026), edited by Joel Ferree and published by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The title section of the book outlines work done under the Lab’s supervision, overseen by Amy Heibel, LACMA’s associate vice president of web and digital media and the Lab’s founding director, and Ferree, program director of LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab. Artists have been invited to apply for grants through an open call in a program that has been backed by big tech companies, including most recently the Hyundai Motor Company.

The many technical and conceptual highlights covered in 11 years of the present program include the projects that have led to breakthrough work on Nonny de la Peña and Alex Rivera’s experimental VR project Reaching the Shore (2016), Lawrence Lek’s Death Drive (2021-present day), Nancy Baker Cahill’s project with mycelial networks, Substrate (2022–25), and Lauren Lee McCarthy’s meditation on autonomous vehicles, Auto (2025). Ferree has commissioned a series of artists’ reflections on past projects that are of particular value and, in the case of Lek’s contribution, of a wonderfully disarming humor.

And then, for the technostalgists, there is the section on the museum’s original exercise in art and tech—and the inspiration for the present Lab — which was famously captured in A Report on the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967–1971 (1971). That book, which inspired the new publication, and is analyzed and extracted to great effect in the new volume, has come to be regarded as a collector’s item and a classic of graphic design.

The 1971 reports are just that: granular, elegantly written, businesslike narratives on how the LACMA team of the 1960s engaged Californian corporations in order to work with a stellar line-up of invited artists to dream big dreams of art and technology. In 1969, Andy Warhol was engaged on 3D holographs then 3D printing. The James Turrell and Robert Irwin collaboration makes for a fascinating historical case study. While one of the most ambitious projects of all was Victor Vasarely’s unrealized proposal from 1971 for a machine of lights arranged in a grid that would generate millions of visual patterns related to his paintings; a concept that the IBM corporation deemed prohibitively expensive.

However, in a felicitous outcome that brings the two genealogical layers of art and tech elegantly together, the Vasarely project was eventually evolved as a concept and manifested in a digital space for LACMA by the artist Casey Reas in the form of the engaging interactive web piece METAVASARELY (2023), with a randomizing button (the letter R) and another that allows the online user to download their live outputs.

— Louis Jebb is Managing Editor at Right Click Save.