Digitalism: A History Hiding in Plain Sight

Written by Rebekah Tolley, Producer and Curator of Spotlight: Digitalism at British Art Fair

There is a tendency to tell the history of digital art as though it began with the computer, passed through the internet and arrived, more or less inevitably, at artificial intelligence.

It is a convenient story. It is also wrong.

Long before “digital art” became a category, artists were working with computation, electronics, video, networks, machines and systems, often outside conventional galleries, in universities, laboratories, broadcasting studios, music companies and art schools.

The technologies changed. The terminology changed. But the questions remained remarkably consistent.

What happens when the machine becomes part of the creative process? What happens when an artwork behaves rather than simply exists? And what happens to authorship when the artist creates a system rather than every individual outcome?

These questions are not new.

Digitalism is.

For Spotlight: Digitalism at British Art Fair, it makes sense to view some of this history through a British lens. Not because Britain owns the story - it very clearly doesn't - but because Britain has an extraordinary, sometimes overlooked place within an international history that has been hiding in plain sight.

Before digital art had a name

London, 1968, is one place to begin.

Cybernetic Serendipity, curated by Jasia Reichardt at the ICA, brought artists, engineers, scientists and musicians together around computation, cybernetics, machines and electronic creativity. Among them was British cybernetician Gordon Pask, whose Colloquy of Mobiles created an environment in which machines interacted with one another.

The artwork was no longer simply an object. It could be a system capable of behaviour.

That same year, Alan Sutcliffe, George Mallen and John Lansdown founded the Computer Arts Society. Its Event One at the Royal College of Art in 1969 crossed computer graphics, music, performance and experimental systems.

Britain was unusually fertile ground for these ideas, but it was part of a much larger picture. Georg Nees and Frieder Nake were producing computer-generated drawings in Germany; Hungarian-born Vera Molnár was developing algorithmic approaches that would make her a foundational figure in generative art. Nam June Paik transformed television into artistic material, while Harold Cohen's AARON would begin a decades-long exploration of machine-generated drawing.

There was never a single birthplace of digital art. Its history was networked long before the world itself was.

The machine changes the artist

In Britain, another significant development came not from the art world, but television.

Quantel's Paintbox, launched in 1981, allowed artists to paint and manipulate images electronically with a stylus. In 1984, ten UK art colleges received Paintboxes, helping move the technology beyond broadcasting.

Artists including Kim Mannes-Abbott and Adrian Wilson pushed digital image-making beyond its commercial origins. In a pre-Photoshop era, Paintbox became part of the visual language of MTV, while artists including Keith Haring and David Hockney experimented with the system.

Artists were not simply learning machines.

They were helping determine what those machines might become.

Interaction becomes the artwork

By the 1990s, digital technology was moving rapidly into music, publishing, design, games and popular culture.

Peter Gabriel's Real World Multimedia explored this convergence through works including Xplora 1 and Eve, the latter incorporating artists including Helen Chadwick, Yayoi Kusama, Cathy de Monchaux and Nils-Udo.

These works resisted classification. They weren't quite films, games, books or exhibitions.

They were something else.

London collective Antirom pushed further. Formed in 1994, its artists became interested not simply in presenting digital content but in interaction itself.

The interface was the content.

The viewer became a participant. The artwork became a situation. The artist increasingly designed the conditions under which something could happen.

The web changed the address

Then came a development that transformed culture itself.

In 1989, British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, proposed what became the World Wide Web.

When the Web became publicly accessible, artists did not suddenly discover digital practice.

They discovered distribution.

Websites became galleries. Browsers became interfaces. Databases became material. Audiences became networked. Internationally, net.art emerged through figures including Olia Lialina, Vuk Ćosić, JODI and Heath Bunting.

The network itself could become the medium.

An educational underground

Britain's art schools were also quietly developing this history. Coventry's postgraduate Electronic Art & Design course began in 1987, encouraging artists to move across computers, sound, moving image, interaction, design and performance.

I arrived there in 2001 to study Postgraduate Design & Digital Media / Media Arts. My professor, Rolf Gehlhaar, had worked closely with Karlheinz Stockhausen before developing SOUND=SPACE. Publicly installed at the Centre Pompidou in 1985, it used ultrasonic sensing and computers to transform visitors' movements into sound.

You didn't operate the artwork.

Your presence was the interface.

Coventry was therefore not simply an education in digital media. It was an encounter with

a lineage.

Meanwhile, internationally, Ars Electronica, ZKM and SIGGRAPH were creating sustained platforms connecting art with technology, computer graphics and scientific research.

The history was international.

But gloriously fragmented.

When digital became the environment

The next transformation belonged as much to design as art.

Through the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad, British-born designer Sir Jony Ive helped change our physical relationship with technology. The computer moved from the office to the home, then into our pockets.

For artists, the smartphone became camera, editing suite, sketchbook, cinema, archive, gallery and distribution network simultaneously.

For an earlier generation, working digitally had been a conscious choice. For those who followed, digital was simply the environment in which they grew up.

And this brings us to AI.

Generative systems and machine learning may seem revolutionary, but the questions are familiar. Gordon Pask asked what happens when machines behave. Vera Molnár explored what happens when rules generate images. Harold Cohen asked whether a computer could participate in drawing. Gehlhaar made the audience part of the system.

Today's technology makes these questions newly urgent.

It did not invent them.

So what is Digitalism?

Digitalism is not simply another name for digital art.

It describes a cultural condition in which digital technologies have ceased to be specialist tools and become the infrastructure through which contemporary life is experienced. Its artists work across AI, AR, VR, generative systems, photography, moving image, robotics, digital sculpture and hybrid forms.

Their common ground is not a medium. It is an environment.

Spotlight: Digitalism does not therefore represent the moment digital art arrives.

It represents something more interesting: the moment a history developing for more than half a century becomes visible as a coherent cultural field within the mainstream art world.

Digitalism did not suddenly appear.

We simply reached the point at which decades of artistic experimentation collided with a world that had itself become digital.

The machines have changed.

The questions haven’t.