The Frieze London art fair and a large-scale exhibition at the Tate Modern, Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, bring a fresh London focus this autumn to the burgeoning international digital art scene. Frieze this month shows work by both new and established digital artists. The London-based film-maker Lawrence Lek’s Artist Award commission, Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot, mixes worldbuilding and mechanical sculpture in an immersive environment. The British artist John Akomfrah’s five-channel video work Becoming Wind (2023), exploring the relationship between nature and technology, will be presented on high-specification LG OLED screens. The Finnish artist Jenna Sutela shows neuroactive head-shaped sculptures in glass and programmable LEDs (light-emitting diodes).
In November, the Tate show features more than 70 artists “working between the 1950s and the dawn of the internet age”. From pioneers such as Harold Cohen and Nam June Paik to the Canadian First Nations artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, whose Inherent Rights, Vision Rights (1992) simulates mystical visions, the show will connect digital art’s history to the present era of AI (artificial intelligence) and NFTs (non-fungible tokens).
Randel Bryan, managing director of SXSW London, will bring the celebrated technology and music festival brand to London in June 2025 with astrong visual arts and fashion presence Courtesy SXSW London
Frieze London, Electric Dreams, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s (V&A) first Digital Art Season this autumn and the near prospect of SXSW London—which adds visual arts to the tech and music festival brand’s offering when it comes to the UK capital in June 2025—increase the sense that something is changing. A new kind of digital art ecosystem—given new vigour by what Christiane Paul, curator of digital art at the Whitney Museum of American Art, describes to The Art Newspaper as “the perfect storm” of the NFT boom of 2021 and the growing presence of AI art—is emerging, with London as a global hub; one with a rich academic and institutional history; a city with a critical role today, and potential still to unlock.
Digital art is not a single medium but a combination of forms which mutate with technological development. When The Art Newspaper covered the Digital Art Fair in Hong Kong in October 2023 it listed a typology of 14 variants, from virtual reality (VR) to illustration, projection to machine learning and AI. Those 14 are six more than the eight listed by Paul in her 2015 survey Digital Art.
Nimrod Vardi, creative director of Arebyte, London’s dedicated public gallery for digital art, tells The Art Newspaper that digital art today is a “medium where the tools which artists use are no longer in the realm of the experts but have become more accessible and easier to approach”. The interest that new technologies create drives what Paul calls “waves of attention, which often coincided with technological developments, for example the launch of the World Wide Web and dot.com boom and bust in the mid- to late 1990s, or the rise of social media in the early 2000s”. While waves of attention are cyclical, the circumstances of the last five years—as NFTs and AI captured attention, and as the Covid-19 pandemic caused what Vardi calls a “rapid change in the way we consume entertainment”—have brought digital art to a new level of public awareness.
Catherine Mason, a leading historian of digital art, tells The Art Newspaper that when she started studying the history of computer art in 2002, “almost no one in the art world was interested. Now, with a younger generation, and the entry of digital art into the commercial art market, digital art is having a moment”.
In 1968, Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London became the first great exhibition of digital art, bringing works of cybernetics, robotics and more together, and was described at the time on BBC radio as a show where, “lights flicker and flash, strange music gurgles and plops, and radio-controlled automatons ... wander about humming and buzzing and flapping limbs of metal”. Showing work by 130 artists, and attended by 60,000 visitors, Cybernetic Serendipity still resonates today. The ICA held a one-day event in February that examined the exhibition’s relevance to the age of AI and NFTs, with an opening speech by Jasia Reichardt, the show’s curator nearly 56 years ago.
An outsider medium since the 1960s
That span is captured in Digital Art: 1960s–Now, an important study of the medium published this month, co-written and edited by the digital curatorial team of the V&A, Melanie Lenz, Corinna Gardner and Pita Arreola. But the 1960s digital art world was developed not in London’s burgeoning contemporary art scene, but in the academy. The story of the birth of London’s distinct strand of digital art is brilliantly told by Mason in two books, A Computer in the Art Room (2008) and Creative Simulations (2024). In the first she tells how artists such as Edward Ihnatowicz experimented with robotics, algorithms and interactivity after being given sanctuary in places like the computer science department at University College London (UCL). The Computer Arts Society, born in the back rooms of UCL in 1968, has for over 50 years promoted “the role of digital and electronic media in the arts”.
In the mid 1970s, the Slade School for Art at UCL created the computer and experimental department, which in 1995 became the Slade Centre for Electronic Media in Fine Art. The Slade has just launched its BA in art and technology, “a course for a new generation of artists to create art connected to emerging and disruptive technologies”, to begin in September 2025–another thread in the school’s 50 years at the meeting point of art and technology.
The London-based artist and film-maker Lawrence Lek shows his Artist Award commission, Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot, at Frieze London this month Nishant Shukla
Universities play three roles in London’s digital art ecosystem today—training new artists, undertaking technical research and rethinking the medium and its connections to society. Like the Slade’s BA course, UCL’s MA in digital media builds deep technical skills based on critical understanding—but where the Slade looks to produce artists, the digital media course looks to produce tomorrow’s games and interactive designers. The same is true of the Royal College of Arts’ MA in digital direction —developing digital creativity across VR and XR (extended reality). At Goldsmiths College, the BSc in digital arts computing promises a career in the creative industries.
It is not only institutions which have endured. Artists such as Ernest Edmonds span the whole of London’s digital art history. He tells The Art Newspaper that “nearly all digital artists connected to London” were members of the Computer Arts Society. Edmonds worked at the Slade and at many of the “polytechnics and universities promoting and guiding art/research programmes”. He sees the journey of digital art from outside to the centre as a natural long-form cycle.
The often uneasy relationship between digital art and the mainstream art world has left institutional gaps. Both Tate and the V&A hold digital art collections but they are relatively small. Melanie Lenz, the V&A’s curator of digital art, tells The Art Newspaper that “the V&A first acquired computer-generated art in 1969 but it wasn’t until the late 2000s that the digital art collection was significantly enhanced with the acquisition of some 250 artworks”. Tate has tended more to tactical commissions such as its 1983 exhibition of the AI art pioneer Harold Cohen or 15 works of net art it produced between 2000 and 2011.
There is no definitive digital art institution in London, nowhere like Ars Electronica in Linz. To Mason, that has meant London “in general has been playing catch up to the rest of Europe”. But as the present wave of interest in digital art has spread, the dispersed, cross-institutional diversity of London’s digital art scene has become a superpower.
A diverse digital arts ecosystem
Vardi says that the diversity in London’s digital arts ecosystem is found in its institutions, “featuring a variety of venues where its unique talent pool can produce and exhibit”; in its artist population that “brings a variety of uses, ideas and opportunities which are innovative not only in their use of technologies but also comment and offer a point of view”, and in its audiences, “eager to experience and attend digital art events”.
Paul sees the distinctive character of London’s digital art scene in the broad variety of its offering—an “interplay of art venues that differ in size and mission but support the digital medium”. This offering ranges from large-scale shows at Tate and the V&A, to what she describes as the north London collaborative group Furtherfield’s “experimentation with alternative systems for creating and showcasing digital art for over 25 years”, to the Serpentine’s deep and prolonged engagement with digital artists.
Serpentine, as so often, is at the heart of structured experimentation in digital art, led by its artistic director, Hans Ulrich Obrist. Fresh from presenting xHairyMutantx (2024) at the Whitney Biennial, the AI artists and musicians Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon open The Call at Serpentine on 4 October, an engagement with vocal data sets recorded with community choirs across the UK, in conjunction with Serpentine’s Future Art Ecosystems. Earlier in the year, Serpentine hosted the superstar media artist Refik Anadol’s first London one-man show, where he worked with “large nature model” AI data sets.
This autumn the V&A hosts its first digital art season, exploring creativity and technology, building on its digital design weekends. Part of this included a recent screening of selected Lumen Prize 2024 finalists. The Lumen Prize, launched in 2012, covers five categories, from still and moving image, through interactive immersive, futures and impact. All five are filled with NFT and AI-based works, from poetry and fashion to reimaginings of the author Jorge Luis Borges and installations based on an artificial mangrove swamp—the Lumen Prize is a living index of the variety of the medium.
Beyond museums, galleries and prizes, Arebyte, based in London’s Canning Town, has pioneered the exhibition of digital art in the last decade. Vardi describes London as their “test bed, exhibition space and community”.
Collaboration with big tech
London has in the past 15 years emerged as a centre for collaboration between art and big tech. Google’s Arts & Culture programme was launched in 2011 to unlock the potential of hi-resolution scans of paintings, and expanded to house an Arts & Culture Lab. The Lab is headed by Freya Salway, who sees London’s diversity as key to uniting “a strong creative tech community” with “the vibrancy of the artistic talent in the city”. London’s artists, she tells The Art Newspaper, have a “spirit of curiosity and openness” which has seen Google commission, and collaborate on, dozens of projects.
Alongside Google, the Taiwanese electronics company HTC has made London the base for its VR programme with artists, initiated in 2017 through a series of collaborations with leading London cultural institutions, including Tate and the Royal Academy. Samantha King, head of programme at HTC’s Vive Arts, sees the city as “a natural draw for companies keen to engage in interdisciplinary, cross-sector collaboration”.
Beyond these global giants, the London-based VR platform Vortic has set a benchmark since 2020 for virtual art shows. Meanwhile, companies in the web3 universe are supporting digital art, most notably the blockchain platform Tezos, whose foundation supports the Serpentine’s Future Art Ecosystems creative research and innovation programme.
Digital art’s impact on the commercial art market remains complex. Looked at from a financial level, the boom and bust of NFTs in 2021-22 saw a huge market build then collapse—then leave a smaller residual market behind of real scale and value. Meanwhile the bottom-up market-shaping work of London galleries integrates digital art pioneers with the marketplace of today. The Mayor Gallery, founded in 1925, showed the work of the computer art pioneer Vera Molnár in the lead-up to Frieze. Mason highlights galleries including Unit London and Hofa Gallery as players in this space. Both she and Paul identify Gazelli Art House as a key innovator.
Gazelli began its exploration of digital art in 2015 with a digital residency programme. From the beginning it looked, as Mila Askarova, its chief executive and founder, says, to ask “how the gallery can support artists who are working in mediums that do not yet have a sustainable market” and also to “help build the ecosystem around digital art overall”.
Gazelli operates as a bridge between the ultra-contemporary in digital art and its pioneers, notably with their representation of Harold Cohen. Working with his estate since 2022, Gazelli has helped put Cohen at the centre of the global discussion of AI in art, with a survey at the Whitney this year and his work featuring in Electric Dreams at Tate.
A new vision of what galleries can be is being developed by Hackney Wick’s ArtSect. ArtSect’s founder Miki Elson says digital art “touches many subjects that are suppressed worldwide and many ... artists come here to further their practice with unbounded freedom”.
Central London has seen the emergence of immersive institutions—large scale digital art galleries. Outernet, W1 Curates, Frameless, 180 Studios and more have brought digital artists to large audiences. Both Outernet and Frameless support emerging talent, Outernet through the Sysco Creative AI Challenge staged with UCL and Goldsmiths students in summer 2023, and Frameless through its artist residencies programme, partnering with the Royal College of Art
New locations, new festivals
The growth of Peckham Digital festival, now in its third year, shows London’s bottom-up, dispersed digital creativity at its best. The creative technology festival giant South by South West (SXSW) comes to Shoreditch in June, with a special focus on art and fashion. Patrick Moore, SXSW London’s adviser on visual arts, tells The Art Newspaper that the festival will focus on a “distinction between emerging artists interested in cross-disciplinary work and more established artists who are particularly interested in technology”. Being cross-disciplinary, Moore says, “will blow through all the way to the projects we’re developing with Alex Poots [creative adviser to the festival]. These are focused on artists who are further along in their career, but they’ll have the same focus, either heavily integrated with technology or cross-disciplinary on a significant level.”
For artists, Edmonds says, much available funding is “skewed towards digital distribution and outreach as against employing digital media in making new forms of art”. A new package from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Arts Council England confirms this. Immersive Arts, a £3.6m part of a wider £6m programme, XRtists, launched in May 2023, supports UK artists in testing and prototyping immersive technologies, “to developing sustainable business models for incorporating XR into production, practice and audience offering”. It shows a focus—for better or worse—beyond artistic technology innovation.
As always, funding remains a critical challenge, an issue Claudel Goy, managing director of Arebyte, sees as a huge gap in London’s ecosystem. She says, “Capital infrastructure funding streams for digital art, both public and private, are limited. Increasing these opportunities is essential to empower artists to push creative boundaries.” Could new funding lead to a permanent public museum of digital art—an Ars Electronica for London—or a festival that does for digital art what Siggraph has done for computer graphics?
The spotlight put on digital art by AI and NFTs, by the pandemic and by the rise of the immersive institution has seen it, says Paul, expand “so much it has become less unified and operates more in local scenes”. That leaves digital arts literacy, and what Paul calls an “understanding of the digital medium’s aesthetic language” as the critical issue which will keep digital art front and centre as attention on the latest technology hype cycle dims and fades.