Digital art explained, from generative code to immersive rooms
From plotter drawings in the 1960s to video, net art, immersive projections and AI, a calm guide to art made with machines and to how museums keep it alive.
Digital art can sound like a recent invention, something born with smartphones and social media. In fact artists have worked with computers for about sixty years, and with electronic images for even longer. What unites the many forms is not a look but a method: the work exists as code, signals or data, and it needs a machine to be seen.
The first computer artists of the 1960s
In the early 1960s computers filled whole rooms and belonged to universities, research laboratories and large companies. A few mathematicians and engineers began to use them to make pictures, drawn line by line by a , a machine that moves a pen across paper following the instructions of a program.
In 1965 three small exhibitions showed such drawings to the public. Georg Nees exhibited in Stuttgart in February, A. Michael Noll and Béla Julesz in New York in April, and Nees together with Frieder Nake in Stuttgart again in November. Nake’s plotter drawing Hommage à Paul Klee, made in 1965, translated the grids and lines of a Klee painting into rules for a program.
The Hungarian born artist Vera Molnár, who had already made rule based drawings by hand, gained access to a computer in Paris in 1968 and worked with programs for the rest of her long life, until her death in 2023. Also in 1968, the exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London brought computer art, music and machines to a wide audience.
In the 1970s the painter Harold Cohen developed AARON, a program that produced drawings by itself according to rules he wrote. He kept refining it for decades, and it is now seen as an early chapter in the long story of art and artificial intelligence.
Video, the internet and generative art
Television was the other great electronic medium. Nam June Paik, widely regarded as the founder of video art, showed television sets whose images he had distorted with magnets at an exhibition in Wuppertal in 1963. When portable video equipment arrived later in the decade, artists began to record performances, build sculptures from stacked monitors and fill whole rooms with screens.
In the mid-1990s, as the World Wide Web spread, artists began to make : works that live in the browser, use links, email and code as their material and are often meant to be seen on a home computer rather than in a gallery. Much of it was playful, critical and deliberately rough.
is a broader term for work in which the artist designs a system, often a program, that produces the final images or sounds with a degree of chance. The early plotter drawings were generative, and so are many contemporary works that look different every time they run. The artist’s creative act lies in the rules as much as in any single result.
The artist’s creative act lies in the rules as much as in any single result.
Immersive rooms, VR and AR
Over the past decade large immersive projection spaces have opened in many cities. Walls and floors become screens, and visitors walk through moving images, sometimes of works by historic painters, sometimes of original digital pieces. They can be spectacular, but it is worth asking whether a show presents a new artwork or an enlarged reproduction of old ones.
Virtual reality, or VR, uses a headset to place you inside a fully digital space. Augmented reality, or AR, adds digital layers to the real world, usually seen through a phone or tablet. Artists use both to build entire worlds, to place invisible sculptures in public squares or to let you step inside a picture. Museums often show such works in timed slots, because only a few people can wear the headsets at once.
NFTs, a short and neutral history
An , short for non-fungible token, is a unique entry on a blockchain, a shared digital ledger. It works like a certificate: it records who holds a token linked to a digital file, but it is not the file itself and does not normally transfer copyright. Early experiments date from around 2014, and a widely used technical standard for such tokens was proposed in 2017.
In 2021 interest exploded. In March of that year Christie’s sold a purely digital work tied to an NFT for about 69.3 million US dollars including fees, the first such work offered by a major auction house. In 2022 trading collapsed as cryptocurrency markets fell, with widely reported figures showing monthly volumes down by more than 90 percent within the year.
arisano gives no financial or investment advice. For art history, the episode matters mainly because it pushed questions of digital ownership, editions and authenticity into the open.
AI and how museums keep digital art alive
Artificial intelligence is the newest and most debated tool. Image generators trained on huge collections of existing pictures raise open questions about authorship, originality, consent and copyright, and courts and lawmakers in several countries are still working through them. Some artists treat AI as a collaborator, others as a subject to criticise, and many refuse it altogether. It is too early to say how history will judge it.
For museums, digital works pose a practical problem: hardware breaks, software ages and file formats become unreadable. Specialist conservators of time-based media document each work in detail, including the artist’s wishes, the equipment and the code. They then use strategies such as migration, moving a work to new formats or devices, and , imitating an old computer on a new one so that the original software can still run.
Collecting digital art therefore means collecting instructions as much as objects. When a museum acquires such a work, it often receives files, code, equipment lists and detailed guidance from the artist, so that the piece can still be shown faithfully decades from now.
Terms in this article
- Plotter
- A machine that draws with a pen on paper, guided by instructions from a computer program.
- Generative art
- Art in which the artist designs a system, often code, that produces the final work with some degree of chance.
- Net art
- Art made for the internet, using the browser, links and code as its material, especially from the mid-1990s.
- NFT
- Non-fungible token: a unique record on a blockchain that works like a certificate for a digital item.
- Emulation
- Imitating an obsolete computer or device in software on new hardware so that old artworks can still run.
Readers ask
Is digital art taken as seriously as painting?
Museums treat it that way. Major institutions collect and conserve computer art, video and software-based works, and the pioneers of the 1960s are now part of art history. As with painting, quality varies enormously. The questions to ask are the same: what is the idea, how well is it made, and what does it make you see or feel?
Does owning an NFT mean I own the copyright of the artwork?
Usually not. An NFT records that you hold a token linked to a digital file, while copyright normally stays with the artist unless a separate written agreement transfers it. Terms vary from project to project, so read them carefully. arisano gives no financial, legal or investment advice, and an NFT should never be seen as a guarantee of value.
How do museums show old computer art when the machines no longer work?
They combine several strategies. Some keep original equipment running for as long as possible and collect spare parts. Others migrate the work to new devices or run the original software in emulation on modern computers. Throughout, conservators consult the artist where possible and document every decision, so that future visitors see a version faithful to the work’s intention.
