‘Caravaggio would have murdered someone for a copy of Photoshop. Leonardo would have done far worse for a Claude Code subscription. Those are facts. Artists use whatever it takes.

‘Our world is made of digital stuff. We spend every day looking at glowing slabs of light. Our screens, phones, wristbands, jewelry, cars, and even refrigerators ingest every piece of microdata they can get their greedy little hands on. For every human eyeball, there are twice as many digital cameras; for every insect, 10,000 transistors. We have so completely cyborgified ourselves that the idea of a cyborg has become a quaint anachronism.

‘The same is true of art. In my own life, I learned to 3D model a sculpture before I learned about molding and casting, Photoshop before the darkroom. I never even bothered with linear editing (why would I?). Every painter I know mocks up their work digitally before touching a canvas. Every sculptor I know does the same in Blender or Rhino. Working in an analog medium usually means translating a digitally conceived idea into a physical, oddly retrograde form – like a musician putting out an LP record (also, I like LPs). Artists make art out of the stuff around them. They always have. Digital stuff is what’s around us.

‘So why does digital art still provoke skepticism in many corners of the art world? Why have we as an industry been comparatively slow to adapt? Yes, much of the NFT craze coming out of COVID was deeply unserious, continuing to hamper perceptions of the field. But so was Zombie Formalism and any number of other speculative tropes. Of those unholy things, let us speak no more. What interests me is the work itself and the fast-evolving possibilities connecting the digital and traditional art worlds.

‘I’ll put my cards on the table. I believe in galleries. I believe in collecting. I believe in curation. I believe in criticism. I believe in museums, art schools, art history, and the community that we collectively inhabit. Above all, I believe art should challenge us intellectually, aesthetically, and perceptually. I also believe that very little art, in any medium, actually does. I am not interested in work that flatters its audience, mistakes spectacle and market logic for ideas, or reduces art to endlessly optimized colorful baubles generated by systems trained on auction results. I am very old-fashioned.

‘Which is exactly why I think digital art deserves serious attention. The artists in this presentation, from Harold Cohen and Vera Molnár to Andreas Gursky and Hito Steyerl, from Avery Singer and John Gerrard to DEAFBEEF and William Mapan, along with standout artists I more recently encountered (shoutout Aziza Kadyri!), have all challenged me to see the world differently. They’ve shown me things I hadn’t noticed, and shown me that the world was not quite the way I thought it was.

‘This work takes on some of the most important questions in contemporary art. What is an image when a machine can generate it? What is ownership when a file can be copied infinitely? What does it mean to make something in a world already drowning in pictures?

‘These are not new questions. Artists have been working on variations of them since, oh, I don’t know… The Vedas? Mesopotamia? Lascaux? As far as I’m concerned, this is literally what art is: a continual working-through of what we think we’re doing. And it’s always changing because the world around us is always changing.

‘Zero 10: The Condition makes that argument. Looking across the last 50 years of instruction-based and computational work, from postwar experimentalism through the generative practices of today, I see a continuous thread: a body of work that understands the digital as a medium with its own properties, its own possibilities, and its own demands, in tandem with a growing and ever more engaged audience base. An intergenerational conversation about what it means to be alive in the digital era, conducted by people who were thinking seriously about these questions long before the rest of the world caught up.

‘As generative AI floods the world with texts without authors, art without artists, photographs without photographers, and music without musicians, the conversation is far from academic. It is the central cultural question of the present. The artists in this exhibition have been living inside it for decades. That’s why they’re here. That’s why this matters.