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The art market seems settled on a binary that makes less sense every year: art is either digital, meaning it lives on a screen (and/or printed as an edition), or analogue, meaning it never touched a computer. Fairs, prizes, and open calls are all built on this split. Yet more and more of us working with code produce hybrid or fully analogue objects. In my case, custom code workflows, machine logic and public-domain archives at the start, algorithms and manual digital edition in the middle, and at the end hundreds of hours drawing by hand with ink on paper, one unique object, every digital file destroyed. No prompting anywhere in between. Where does that sit? Nowhere, according to the gatekeepers. This is thankfully changing, but too slowly.
And the binary comes with a second assumption baked in: that computation means typing a sentence into a box. Twenty-five years of code-based practice now reads, to most curators and collectors, as "person who prompts" or (perish the thought!) as “AI art”.
I exhibited algorithmic work at the Reina Sofía Musem in Madrid back in 1999, decades before all this “AI art” nonsense, and still today I get called an “emerging artist”, because the system has no category for radically hybrid work and no category for practitioners who don't fit the young-discovery narrative either.
Curious whether others here feel the same squeeze. Is the digital/analogue split still useful to anyone except the people selling booths, or is it time to retire it?
5 comments
Please note that I didn’t say “the art world”, or “the artists”. I said “the art MARKET”.
I don’t know if that’s how the art market classifies art.
I think any split is definitely misleading when many artists (or rather their studios) that are in the “analogue” category use digital tools or procedures before ending with a physical result. A big philosophical question could be how much of the digital procedure is needed for a piece to be considered more digital than “analogue” as you say. Or does the end result dictate what a piece is?
I also think the split is true to an extent when it comes to IRL events. I’ve visited art events that had pretty obvious segmentation like Art Basel but then other events like Basel Social Club had a very interesting co-existence of both. I’ve realised as long as the crowd perceives it as new media and not something more complex/contemporary like AI or generative for example, it’s fine.
But there is definitely a big crowd that is very anti anything digital and would fight for the segmentation to remain.
I think it’s a false debate, and I value every opportunity to say it. Each artist is absolutely free to incorporate any medium in any manner in his/her works. I believe we should let art historians of the future decide how to classify artworks. At which point is a work containing both digital and physical pieces “digital” or “physical”? How do we make this determination? Who decides? And in the end, is it an interesting question?
Is “analogue” really the right word?
I mainly know it from audio engineering and signal theory, where it’s a term used to describe an intangible feature of physical magnetic tape and electronics hardware called “analogue warmth”, that was really hard to perfectly simulate on computers until about a decade ago. I mean I get what you roughly mean by it when pertaining to physical art, but like you also seem to be saying, this “analogy” (heh) doesn’t quite fit as well on closer inspection.
I wouldn’t know a better word though, because any term or way to describe it, has its own short-comings. And for me at least, that is one of the things that fascinate me.
I think your question is also about the story that the artists tell, and/or the stories that get told about their art. I’ve seen plenty of sculptural artworks that incorporate 3D-printed elements, but they’re not called “digital artists”.
If you’re a writer and you didn’t use an old school mechanical typewriter to write your book, but a word processor, does that make you a digital artist? Are photographers with digital camera, digital artists?
Is all contemporary pop music, digital art?
I’ve heard the term analog generative procedure to describe non-digital procedures to introduce randomness. For example using dice.
I haven’t heard it or seen it used to describe art that isn’t natively digital until today.