2025 has been a pivotal year for digital art and it’s hard not to be excited about the promise of a new landscape.

Looking back, we’ve watched the space mature in ways that would have seemed impossible just five years ago. Questions about legitimacy have quieted thanks to the institutional recognition of artists and computational practices that have historically been ignored, just as grassroots communities continue to push the envelope of the expanding art world. With both the Whitney Biennial and Venice Biennale on the horizon for 2026, it feels as though we’re entering a new phase entirely: one where digital isn’t a sector or sidebar, but simply another part of the conversation.

What struck me most at Zero 10 during Art Basel Miami Beach was the idea of three generations working simultaneously. There are pioneers who’ve been working with algorithms for decades, building the foundations we all stand on; a mid-career cohort that came up through the blockchain and NFT boom, who turned natively digital practices into viable markets; and newly emerging artists for whom “digital” isn’t even a meaningful qualifier, merely an indicator of how work gets made—as natural as oil paint was to previous generations.

The selections for the Whitney Biennial suggest the curators understand the need for multi-generational layering. It’s not about representing digital art as a category, but about acknowledging that digital tools and concerns have permeated artistic practices for decades.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

The editors of Right Click Save and MASSAGE MAGAZINE have curated an exhibition, “Patterns of Entanglement”, at NEORT++ in Tokyo (until December 21), that examines the ways technology is woven into natural systems. For this week’s newsletter, the participating artists consider the implications of emerging technologies in conversation with Alex Estorick and Yusuke Shono. Read the rest of their interview here and the show’s accompanying essay here.

Libby Heaney: Technology needs artists because we subvert and expand the uses of technologies and ask questions scientists and technologists would never dream of posing because of the reductionist framework they work within.

‍Primavera De Filippi: Artists are experimenters. When I started researching the legal implications of blockchain technology and smart contracts in 2013, the academic world dismissed it as science fiction. I created an artistic project, Plantoids, to make these concepts more tangible.

Deborah Tchoudjinoff: Artists have always been finding their edges to experiment with and against. In doing so, they produce knowledge(s) and fluency with visual and critical language. 

Yoshi Sodeoka: I think artists can show what technology feels like, not just what it does. We can play with it, break it, bend it, and use it in ways it was not designed for. Our job is to ask questions, find strange angles, and reveal possibilities that might not show up in a practical or commercial context.

terra0: Artists must become aware of the “technical a priori” of technologies, that is, they must uncover and reflect on the social, economic, and ultimately societal conditions of technology. And from this process, reinterpretation, repurposing, and hacking can emerge.

Helen Knowles: Through staging, re-enactment, performance, and film, I ask what can be revealed about the social, ethical, and moral matrices that underpin psychedelic medicine and the Indigenous use of plant medicines.

Kazuhiro Tanimoto: For viewers, encountering technology outside of its conventional uses can open up a sense of its multiplicity and reveal aspects of its nature that remain hidden in strictly functional contexts.

Matt DesLauriers: My project, Latent Dispatch, reveals the flattening effects of machine perception, and asks what we might do to resist it. Even the smallest gestures, like an audience’s spontaneous doodle or scribble on paper, can inject noise into this feedback loop, and provide a richer landscape of human experience for future audiences (and machines) to learn from.

Gretchen Andrew: My passion as an artist lies in making the normally hidden and invisible aspects of technology visible, so that we can engage with them in broader cultural conversations outside of both the tech world and the fine art world.

Yoshiaki Nishimura for Sensorium: There is a phrase used by Shigehiko Hasumi in reference to cinema: “Technology is born twice.” […] In other words, technology first appears as technology, and only later is it reborn as expression.