Happy Thanksgiving week to this incredible community! I’m genuinely grateful for the space we’ve carved out together to think, debate, and create in the ever-shifting landscape of digital art.

Speaking of spaces: if you’ve been on X lately, you’ve likely experienced the chaos of the recent DM update, which has left many of us scrambling through lost messages and broken threads. It’s a stark reminder that our community deserves better: a stable, safe place where conversations don’t disappear into an algorithmic void.

One healthy debate that hasn’t disappeared concerns generative AI, with such terms as “post-photography” and “promptography” continually cropping up in the feed. As an artist who works extensively with generative AI, often in a photorealistic style, these discussions are not abstract to me but personal: they’re about how we understand the tools I use daily as well as the work I create.

Reading Kevin Abosch’s post about the medium and the mechanism this week, I found myself returning to Vilém Flusser’s Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985), in which he argued, long before the dawn of generative AI, that “technical images rely on texts from which they have come and, in fact, are not surfaces but mosaics assembled from particles. They are therefore not prehistoric, two-dimensional structures but rather posthistorical, without dimension.” Whether we’re discussing AI-generated imagery, digital photography, or even television, Flusser’s framework challenges us to see these images not as simple surfaces but as complex assemblages—products of systems, codes, and instructions that precede the image itself.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

The non-profit online documentary producer Art21 has added a new strand, IRL/url, featuring the work of eight artists working across physical and digital mediums, to its catalogue of documentaries on contemporary artists. The new series of shorts films, launched via TikTok on November 14, includes self-narrated pieces on Neïl Beloufa, Jacky Connolly, Julien Creuzet, Sara Cwynar, Xin Liu, Ho Tzu Nyen, Rachel Rossin, and Jacolby Satterwhite. The films, produced in partnership with Chanel Culture Fund and designed for social media, are being made available on Art21’s TikTok, YouTube, and website, with highlights on Chanel’s and Art21’s Instagram channel.

The launch of IRL/url followed the opening of the 12th season of Art21’s award-winning series Art in the Twenty-First Century, which has catalogued the work of over 300 practitioners globally over the past quarter-century. That new season, which premiered on PBS and art21.org on October 17, features the work of artists including Anne Imhof and Sophie Calle.

The China-born Xin Liu, who works between New York and London, made headlines when a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by developing a robot to carry her extracted wisdom tooth into space on the International Space Station. In the first of his documentary shorts, released on November 24, the New York-based Satterwhite—whose New World Order (2023-24) was a showstopper on the Kadel Willborn stand at Frieze London 2024—vogues through the streets of the Big Apple, and “rides a Pegasus” in cyberspace. “I’m living in the landscape of cyberspace and trying to make it tactile and poetic, and to have fun with it, like a kid,” he says.

“Today, artists are working across both physical and virtual worlds, reshaping how we understand identity, community, and creative expression in an increasingly hybridized society,” said Tina Kukielski, Art21’s Susan Sollins Executive Director and Chief Curator, in an online launch statement. Chanel Culture Fund supports art initiatives and awards around the world including Reframing Narratives: Women in Portraiture at London’s National Portrait Gallery, a project designed to redress the balance of female representation in the collection. By 2025 almost half (48%) of the total portraits on display in the gallery made after 1900 had come to feature women, up from one-third in 2020.

The work of the artist and former physicist Libby Heaney, who uses quantum technology to make art, is on show at Orleans House Gallery, west London, until March 1, 2026. Shadowscapes: Heaney, JMW Turner and Quantum marks both the centenary of quantum physics and the 250th anniversary of the birth of Turner, the visionary landscape artist and forerunner of Modern Art.

In a show where Heaney presents a digital-quantum sound installation Wilderness Within and a group of watercolors, the artist explores her “shadow self”, taking inspiration from the psychotherapist CG Jung, according to a statement on the gallery website, to reinterpret “Turner’s use of light and dark as psychological metaphors for her own unruly emotions.” The exhibition includes three paintings by Turner that have inspired Heaney’s work: The Vision of Jacob’s Ladder (?) (c. 1830); The Hero of a Hundred Fights (1800-10, reworked 1847) and Rocky Bay with Figures (1827-30).

Daniel Ambrosi: Central Park, at Robilant + Voena in New York (to December 4 2025) forms a vivid follow-up to the digital artist’s 2023 show at the gallery’s London space focused on the work of the landscape designer Capability Brown at great British houses such as Blenheim Palace, Chatsworth, and Stourhead. The London show revealed, in Ambrosi’s outputs, how he had, with help from Joseph Smarr at the tech giant Google and Chris Lamb at Nvidia, pioneers of accelerated computing, worked to prompt Google DeepDream to “dream”, in overnight processing sessions, on his 500MB digital photographs of these Elysian landscapes.

The Ambrosi outputs are arrestingly hyperreal, with the cloudless immediacy of the pre-Raphaelites at their most exacting. For the ten works in his “Central Park” show, Ambrosi, a native New Yorker, worked in 2025 on high-res photographs taken around Manhattan’s urban oasis in 2013. In March 2025, his Central Park Nightfall—a limited edition work from the present series—was included in Christie’s “Augmented Intelligence” sale in New York, the first sale solely dedicated to AI art at a major auction house.

Riyadh becomes a site of aesthetic inquiry in Noor Riyadh 2025 (until December 6), where light negotiates the relationship between urban space, memory, and imagination. Under the curatorial direction of Mami Kataoka, alongside Sara Almutlaq and Li Zhenhua, the festival unfolds under the theme “In the Blink of an Eye”, reflecting the accelerated transformation of the city. Historical districts, contemporary architecture, and urban infrastructure are interwoven to create an environment in which illumination structures the experience of time, movement, and spatial awareness. The festival stages a dialogue between heritage and futurism, stasis and motion, materiality and immateriality. Three installations exemplify this curatorial vision.

Luna Somnium by the collective fuse* translates lunar data into a meditative architectural environment, producing a threshold between scientific observation and imaginative speculation. Synthesis by Christophe Berthonneau and László Zsolt Bordos choreographs architecture, drone movement, and mapping into a kinetic spectacle in which geometry seems to float and urban form dissolves into ephemeral patterning. Liminal Air Space-Time by Shinji Ohmaki immerses viewers in a subtle interplay of light, motion, and atmosphere, generating a heightened awareness of temporality and space. Together, these works explore how light can organize space, shape experience, and evoke shifts in awareness, establishing a dialogue between the physical city and its interpretation.

Noor Riyadh 2025 situates the city as a dynamic gallery. Through precise curation and formally rigorous interventions, the festival encourages sustained attention, reflection, and engagement with the urban environment, demonstrating how light can operate simultaneously as a medium and as a conduit for ideas.

— Marlene Corbun is an independent art advisor and curator specializing in Contemporary and Web3 Art, with a deep passion for supporting living artists and exploring how their work fosters new perspectives and societal dialogues. Her expertise bridges traditional art practices and the dynamic digital art landscape.