One of the talks you’ve programmed is titled ‘Barbarians at the Gates! Let Them in!?’ Do you see the growing acceptance of digital art as a challenge to the established order?
I was being a bit spicy with that title! But I don’t know if it’s a changing of the order so much as a moment of transition. We currently have a collision of worlds – internet-native artists and collectors engaging with people from traditional, institutional backgrounds. I think it’s important to identify serious work from artists who haven’t been taken seriously by institutions – often because they emerged in contexts without strong critical or institutional frameworks.
What role do institutions have in shaping how digital art is understood?
Right now we’re in a period of enthusiastic, high-volume output, but it’s occurring within a framework that requires a fundamental rethinking of the purpose of institutions – who they serve, what they exclude, and how they remain relevant. If you project five or 10 years into the future, institutions could go in many different directions, especially as artists and collectors emerge from internet-native contexts. HeK, the House of Electronic Arts in Basel, marks the first time an institution has taken part in Zero 10, and they’ve been thinking about digital art in this expanded sense for a long time. Their collection includes works that, to me, are absolutely canonical – artists like JODI, UBERMORGEN, and etoy – people I was looking at when I was coming up. At the time, that work was marginalized by mainstream institutions, but that’s starting to change.
