Right Click Save’s Top 10 Stories in 2025

1. AI | Alternative Intentions

Leading artists and thinkers raise the stakes in the great artificial intelligence debate.

In order to address the uncertainty surrounding so-called “AI art”, the Editor-in-Chief of Right Click Save, Alex Estorick, invited prominent artists and theorists working at the intersection of art and technology to stake out their positions within this debate. With contributions from Memo Akten & Katie Peyton Hofstadter; Botto; Alejandro Cartagena; Stephanie Dinkins; Charlotte Kent; Yuma Kishi; Trevor Paglen; and Caroline Zeller.

‍I view AI as a tool that can both preserve and transform our visual culture — an instrument that not only replicates but also reinterprets past visual gestures. (Alejandro Cartagena)

2. Whatever Happened to NFTs?

Kyle Waters, co-founder and CPO of PortexAI, a decentralized global marketplace for the new data economy, and Alex Estorick discuss the evolving market for digital art.

They consider the sobering reality felt by many startups that built their brands off the back of 2021’s NFT boom: that the economics have simply stopped making sense. At the same time, in February 2025, they found there were reasons to be skeptical of the death of NFTs as the market underwent visible and painful evolution, and activity moved to new corners of the on-chain universe. 

At a micro level, it is likely that successful consumer projects going forward will avoid the word “NFT”, interest in which has plummeted even while searches for “Crypto” and “Bitcoin” accelerate.

3. Announcing a New Home for Right Click Save

The magazine’s new owner, Tony Lyu, shares his journey into digital art with Jason Bailey and Alex Estorick, founders of Right Click Save.

In digital art, speculation certainly has been present, but what matters is focusing on the long-term, value-preserving questions. That is what Right Click Save has always focused on: anchoring the conversation in ideas that will still matter years from now. (Tony Lyu)

4. On China’s digital Art Ecosystem

With (Wu Yishen), the founder and CEO of MUDigital, Shanghai, and Noriaki Nakata, of NEORT++, Tokyo, and formerly organizer of Crypto Art Week Asia in Tokyo in 2021 and Crypto Art Fes 2023, discuss how generative art is igniting the Shanghai art scene.

China is a very promising digital art hub. We just need a bit more patience and preparation. Computer art has existed for more than 60 years and I believe its heyday is still to come; we don’t need to rush. (With)

5. Notes from the Avant NFT Underground

A core member of the community, GardenParty85, traces a history of the grassroots movement mining subculture to the limit.

To know this world is to live on the timeline, to be in more Twitter group chats than you care to, and to understand the history and personal conflicts that make this scene as much of a pro wrestling-style soap opera as it is a new branch of contemporary art. (GardenParty85)

6. On Painting’s Digital Ruins

The New York-based artist Chris Dorland on how the aesthetics of technical failure can help to reimagine broken systems. He spoke to the art historian and advisor Annie Pereira about his exhibition “Clone Repo (server ruin)” at Nicoletti Contemporary, London.

For this show, I kept thinking about the archive — less as a metaphor but as a physical place. I imagined a kind of Borgesian repository: endless rooms of servers storing everything. Then I asked, what happens when that infrastructure fails, when the servers break down and the data glitches? From there, the show just snapped into place. (Chris Dorland)

7. When We Became Posthuman

N. Katherine Hayles, a leading scholar of literature, science, and technology, is rethinking cognition to account for both humans and nonhumans. She spoke to Jesse Damiani, presenter of Urgent Futures podcast. The article features works of synthetic photography by Damien Roach.

It’s no exaggeration to say [that] from this point forward, the evolutionary trajectory of humans is going to be indissolubly bound up with the evolution of artificial intelligence. (N. Katherine Hayles)

8. The Interview | Libby Heaney

The artist and former physicist discusses the power of quantum computing to capture a hybrid world with Alex Estorick.

Some artists are using quantum to replicate the existing world, which is just digital art using a different tool. I’m interested in using quantum technology to create a new aesthetics based on the materiality of the quantum world. (Libby Heaney)

9. The Art of the Game

With the launch of his new video game, LIFT (a self portrait), Snowfro (Erick Calderon), founding CEO of Art Blocks, discusses the gamification of art and life with the artist Mitchell F. Chan. Their conversation is hosted by Alex Estorick.

It’s really important to me to be able to give people the experience of a mass-produced video game with the same quality, box design, and insert, but yours is a unique, individualized object and there’s no other copy of it on the planet. (Erick Calderon)

10. Can Art and Tech Giants Shape Education with AI?

Robin Leverton reports on a program hosted at Tate, London, generating critical and creative approaches to technology. Goldsmiths and the University of the Arts London selected 40 students to participate in a project focused on AI as a tool and creative partner. Coinciding with Tate Modern’s 25th birthday and supported by Anthropic, the company behind the AI assistant Claude, Tech, Tea + Exchange offered students an intensive program of workshops where they could learn from prominent digital artists, curators, and media theorists while developing their own research practices.

Working at the crossroads of art, tech, and academic insight was exhilarating but the real highlight was watching students grow into confident, critical users of Claude and generative AI, harnessing these tools as creative partners in their own evolving practices. I hope we can continue this exciting journey together. (Annie Bicknell, Curator of Public Practice, Tate)