David Hockney, whose death was announced today, was an exemplar of a world-famous artist who experimented, over time, with new technologies. That time was taken to master a craft—whether using the immediacy of Polaroid to experiment with multi-focus composition, or the Brushes tool on iPhone to discover new ways of capturing light and color—rather than to tick off a flashy new tool. The retrospective “Hockney 25” at Fondation Louis Vuitton in 2025, and “David Hockney: A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting”, now at Serpentine, London, serve as reminders of how much he did to usher in the reality of a digital form of painting.

Hockney’s unique trajectory as an artist throws into relief how, for years, the digital and traditional art worlds occupied parallel universes, occasionally intersecting and often misunderstanding one another. But as Art Basel opens its doors next week, we’re witnessing a remarkable convergence.

A number of Web3-native galleries are debuting in Basel alongside established blue chips, while ArtMeta’s ambitious exhibition “Digital Masterpieces: From Code to Canon” traces nearly seven decades, and multiple chapters, of overlooked art history, stretching from early computer art trailblazers to today’s networked and AI-driven practices. These different threads of digital art history run through this week’s articles. Georg Bak speaks with David Em, whose journey from Xerox PARC and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to the present day offers a bridge between digital art’s earliest experiments and its contemporary moment. While artist and electronic musician Carsten Nicolai reveals what made Berlin so fertile as a test bed for all forms of creativity after the fall of the wall in his conversation with Viola Lukács.

Fittingly, our Founding Editor, Alex Estorick, will be in Basel moderating a panel discussion on “How Masterpieces Are Made: Canon Formation in Digital Art”, a topic that feels timely as digital art’s histories become evermore visible.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

The artists Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Holly Herndon, Andrew Thomas Huang, Kate Crawford, Akinola Davies Jr., Xin Liu, Sougwen Chung, and Razik Darji, are among the first announced participants of Creative Intelligence, a new London-based festival exploring how art and technologies, including AI, are combining to shape the future. The event, which runs from September 11 to 13, 2026, at Southbank Centre, is inspired by the 75th anniversary of the Festival of Britain, the utopian, post-austerity artist and scientist-led celebration of the future which was the Centre’s foundational moment in 1951.

Creative Intelligence was commissioned and produced by the Centre and is curated with PACT (Planetary Art Culture Technology). Keri Elmsly, founder of PACT, was invited by Mark Ball, artistic director of Southbank Centre, to curate the first festival. “The fundamental engagement with our own power and agency and imagination is what I want people to come away with,” Elmsly tells Right Click Save, “in whatever form that speaks to them. Because this is for everybody.”

Peckham Digital—the annual, community-led festival and creative technology organization in south-east London—will present the city’s grassroots creative computing communities in the foyer of the Queen Elizabeth Hall during the festival.

The festival includes a one-day Creative Intelligence Summit, involving discussions and performances led by many of the featured artists—including a deep listening exercise led by Herndon—as well as a discussion of “The Image After AI” with Sougwen Chung, K Allado-McDowell, and Andrew Thomas Huang, hosted by Alex Estorick, Founding Editor of Right Click Save.