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ArtMeta: When Digital Art Enters the Canon, Tech Millionaires Will Enter the Market

Georg Bak and Roger Haas believe that the wealth passing to a generation of digital natives, paired with new wealth built in the tech industry, will give digital art a stronger foundation, fundamentally transforming the market.

Those who ventured beyond the main halls of Art Basel to explore Zero10, the mega’s digital art initiative presented this year for the first time at its Swiss flagship edition, likely paused to take in one particularly museum-like display featuring works ranging from vintage-look prints to code-generated abstracts displayed on screens. Titled “From Code to Canon: Celebrating 70 Years of Digital Art,” ArtMeta’s booth had a lot to offer anyone wanting to learn about the history of digital art. The presentation traced computer and electronic image-making back to the 1950s, beginning with works such as the oscilloscope imagery of Ben F. Laposky, Mary Ellen Bute and Desmond Paul Henry. Structured in seven chapters—SIGNAL, SYSTEM, GRAPHIC, NETWORK, GENERATIVE, INTELLIGENCE and PROTOCOL—the booth connected early electronic signals and algorithmic graphics to contemporary A.I. and blockchain-based practices. Emerging alongside early mainframe computers, cybernetics and information theory, these experiments positioned digital art as something born from light, signal and machine-mediated perception before the digital image existed as a file. Among the booth’s historical gems was Charles Csuri’s Numeric Milling (1968), one of the earliest physical 3D sculptures created using a computer algorithm, priced at $200,000.

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ArtMeta launched around 2021 as a curatorial platform for digital art, aiming to contribute to its historical, critical and cultural contextualization. Co-founders Georg Bak and Roger Haas worked in art and culture, including in the traditional gallery system, for more than 25 years. Over time, they realized that, despite living in the age of the internet, blockchain and A.I., digital art was still largely neglected by art fairs and institutions. “The art world has been struggling to reinvent itself with never-ending post-isms, although the obvious postmodern art movement was digital art, and it has been there since the 1950s,” they told Observer. “We felt that this huge gap had to be filled and the history of digital art had to be told properly and contextualized within a larger framework of art history.”

Bak and Haas describe ArtMeta as a “forum” dedicated to the history and future of digital art through exhibitions, publications, conferences, community and institutional collaborations. “Our position sits between scholarship, curatorial practice and the art market. We are interested in building the cultural vessel that allows digital art to be understood, collected and ultimately integrated into the broader art system.”

The presentation at Zero10 focused on the intersection of the technological evolution of computing systems and their artistic........

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