hosted by Designboom

Digital art has moved beyond specialised festivals and events. Today it has its own venues, international tours, and audiences of hundreds of thousands of people: unimaginable feats just a decade ago. But this jump in scale has not happened by accident: it’s the result of alliances that are redefining who does what within the contemporary digital art ecosystem. 

In this panel, hosted by Claire Brodka, Managing Editor at designboom, four voices from different parts of the digital art equation come together. Anna Díaz - co-founder of Barcelona’s Hamill Industries - and Kamil Nawratil - founder of Brooklyn studio Volvox Labs - provide perspectives from the studios behind the boom: the places and spaces where teams use craft, code, and visual research to make singular works of art. Myriam Achard - Head of New Media Partnerships and international representative of Montreal’s PHI - and Sandro Kereselidze - founder of art platform Artechouse - represent the spaces that host these works. Here we see two different models - one closer to a cultural institution, and other driven by a more business-centric logic - that show that digital art can fill venues year-round without sacrificing artistic ambition. 

All four share the same belief: the artist needs to be at the centre of the conversation. But what does this really mean when moving beyond niche audiences? How is trust built between studios and venues? What productive tensions emerge when a work breaks into the big leagues, and what do the different parties learn from each other along the way? This is a conversation about the (explicit and implicit) models shaping digital art in the twenty-first century.