Digitalism: A History Hiding in Plain Sight

AUGUST 12, 2026

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 already working with computation, electronics, video, networks, machines and systems. Much of this work happened outside the conventional gallery system: in universities, laboratories, broadcasting studios, music companies, art schools and the increasingly porous territory between art and technology.

The result is not a neat lineage but a sprawling, unruly history…one in which the technologies changed, the terminology changed, and sometimes even the artists changed disciplines, while 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 DIGITALISM at British Art Fair, it makes sense to look at some of this history from a particularly British perspective. Not because Britain owns the story…it very clearly doesn't. Digital art emerged internationally, often simultaneously, through exchanges between artists, mathematicians, engineers, musicians, designers and scientists. But Britain has an extraordinary and sometimes overlooked place within that history.

And much of it has been hiding in plain sight.

Before digital art had a name

One of the most revealing places to begin is London in 1968.

Cybernetic Serendipity, presented at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and curated by Jasia Reichardt, brought artists, engineers, scientists and musicians into a single exhibition around computation, cybernetics, machines, sound and emerging forms of electronic creativity.

Crucially, it was international.

The exhibition brought work and ideas from Britain into conversation with experiments taking place across Europe and the United States. Its significance was not simply that computers had entered the gallery. It was that disciplines—and people—who had previously occupied separate territories were beginning to recognise one another.

Among the participants was the British cybernetician Gordon Pask, whose Colloquy of Mobiles created an environment in which machines interacted with one another. The artwork was not simply an image produced by technology; it was a system capable of behaviour.

That distinction would become fundamental.

In the same year, the Computer Arts Society was founded by Alan Sutcliffe, George Mallen and John Lansdown. The following year, the Society presented Event One at the Royal College of Art. Its programme crossed computer graphics, music, performance and experimental systems. Lansdown was already exploring computer-generated choreography and theatrical performance; others were working across programming, electronic music, architecture and cybernetics.

This was not the beginning of artists “using computers”.

It was the beginning of a different proposition: that computation might itself become a material of artistic thought.

And Britain was unusually fertile ground for that proposition.

But it was only one part of a much larger picture.

At almost exactly the same moment, Georg Nees and Frieder Nake were producing computer-generated drawings in Germany. Hungarian-born Vera Molnár was developing the systematic and algorithmic processes that would establish her as one of the foundational figures of generative art. In the United States, A. Michael Noll, Charles Csuri and John Whitney were exploring computation, animation and computer graphics.

Nam June Paik was turning television and electronic media into artistic material. The New Tendencies movement in Zagreb was bringing artists and theorists together around systems, visual research and computation. Harold Cohen would begin developing AARON in the 1970s, starting a remarkable decades-long investigation into whether a computer system might participate in the act of drawing itself.

There was never a single birthplace of digital art.

Its history was networked long before the world itself was.

The machine changes the artist

The next important developments did not necessarily come from the art world at all.

In Britain, Quantel was developing digital imaging technology for television and broadcast production. Its Paintbox, launched in 1981, transformed the relationship between the artist's hand and the digital image. The stylus-driven system allowed images to be painted and manipulated in real time without requiring the artist to write code.

It was expensive, specialised and initially designed for professional broadcasting…but it eventually found its way into British art colleges.

In 1984, ten UK art colleges received Paintboxes.

The consequences were larger than Quantel could have anticipated.

Artists began discovering that digital imaging was not simply a faster way of doing something they had previously done with paint, photography or collage. It altered the process itself. Gesture, colour, layering, scale and photographic manipulation could now be performed inside an electronic environment.

The relationship between artist and technology became reciprocal.

Artists were not simply learning machines.

They were helping determine what those machines might become.

This history is particularly visible in the work of the original Paintbox artists…among them Brits Kim Mannes-Abbott and Adrian Wilson…whose practices helped push digital image-making beyond its broadcast origins.

Quantel's technology became part of a wider visual culture, one that moved between art schools, television, music video, advertising and experimental image-making. In a pre-Photoshop era, Paintbox would become part of the visual language of MTV, with artists including Keith Haring and David Hockney also experimenting with the system.

The distinction between “commercial technology” and “artistic technology” was already beginning to collapse.

Multimedia becomes a cultural space

By the early 1990s, the word multimedia was everywhere.

But beneath the jargon, something genuinely new was happening.

Digital technology was escaping the laboratory and entering music, design, publishing, television, games and popular culture. The CD-ROM became a peculiar transitional object: part book, part film, part software and part artwork.

Singer-songwriter Peter Gabriel's Real World Multimedia studio became one of Britain's most interesting laboratories for this convergence.

Xplora 1, released in 1993, combined music, video, photography and interactive exploration. It treated the computer less as a playback device than as a place to enter the world of the artist.

Then came Eve.

Released in 1996, Eve was an ambitious collaboration between Real World Multimedia and Starwave, built around Gabriel's music and specially commissioned work by contemporary artists including Helen Chadwick, Yayoi Kusama, Cathy de Monchaux and Nils-Udo. More than sixty people were involved in its production.

Contemporary coverage described it not simply as a game but as an interactive journey combining art, music, narrative and technology.

This is a significant moment in the history of digital art precisely because it sits awkwardly between categories.

It wasn't quite a gallery exhibition.

It wasn't quite a film.

It wasn't quite a game.

It wasn't quite a book.

It was something else.

And that “something else” would become increasingly important.

Antirom and the discovery of interaction

In London, another group was pushing the same problem from a different direction.

Antirom formed in 1994 as a reaction against the prevailing idea of multimedia as a container for repurposed content: video, text, audio and images assembled behind a point-and-click interface.

Instead, the collective became interested in interaction itself.

Its Arts Council-funded CD-ROM consisted of small experimental “toys”…systems built around sound, movement, scrolling, collision, response and play.

The interface wasn't a door through which the user accessed content.

The interface was the content.

This was a crucial conceptual shift.

The viewer became a participant.

The artwork became a situation.

And the artist became, increasingly, someone who designed the conditions under which something could happen.

Antirom's influence reached far beyond its relatively modest output. It helped shape a generation of British interactive designers and artists, among them people who would go on to influence the wider digital culture of the following decades.

The web didn't begin digital art. It changed its address.

And then something happened that changed not simply digital art, but culture itself.

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

Its origins were pragmatic: a means of enabling scientists and institutions to share information more effectively across different computer systems.

Its cultural consequences were anything but.

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

They discovered distribution.

The artwork no longer had to occupy a gallery, a television screen, a CD-ROM or a dedicated installation.

It could live somewhere else.

Websites became galleries.

Browsers became interfaces.

Mailing lists became communities.

Databases became raw material.

The audience became networked.

And artists separated by thousands of miles could suddenly occupy the same cultural space.

Internationally, this gave rise to the practices that became known as net.art, associated with figures including Vuk Ćosić, Olia Lialina, JODI and Heath Bunting. The Web was no longer simply somewhere an artwork could be reproduced or advertised.

The network itself could become the medium.

And perhaps most importantly, the artwork could change after it had been “finished”.

This unsettled one of the oldest assumptions of art: that the work is a stable object created by an individual artist and subsequently encountered by a viewer.

Digital practice made instability productive.

Coventry and the educational underground

The postgraduate Electronic Art & Design course at Coventry began in 1987.

That date matters.

It places Coventry within the first generation of British higher-education environments to take electronic and digital practice seriously as an artistic field…before “new media” had settled into institutional terminology and long before digital art acquired anything resembling a conventional market.

The course did not prescribe a single medium or style.

Its importance was precisely that it encouraged artists to work across disciplines: moving image, sound, computers, interaction, design, performance and emerging technologies.

Some of its archive is now held by the V&A, itself an institution that has become increasingly important to the preservation and interpretation of Britain's digital and computer-generated art history.

I came to Coventry as a postgraduate student in Design & Digital Media / Media Arts in 2001.

By then the technology had changed dramatically from the early days of computer art, but the intellectual proposition remained familiar: the computer was not merely something to operate.

It was something to think with.

My professor, Rolf Gehlhaar, a pioneer of computer-aided composition and interactive music, was one of the people who made that proposition tangible.

Rolf studied philosophy, science and music at Yale and Berkeley before moving to Cologne in 1967 to work closely with Karlheinz Stockhausen as his assistant, performer and sound technician. But it was his development of SOUND=SPACEthat particularly anticipated so much of what we now describe as interactive digital practice.

Conceived in the early 1980s and publicly installed at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1985 as part of Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput's Les Immatériaux, SOUND=SPACE used ultrasonic sensing, computers and synthesisers to turn the movements of people within a physical space into sound.

You did not press a button to trigger the work.

Your presence was the interface.

For me, Coventry was therefore not simply an education in digital media.

It was an encounter with a lineage.

From net art to network culture

By the late 1990s and early 2000s, the distinction between digital art and digital culture became increasingly difficult to maintain.

Artists were working with browsers, databases, games, webcams, virtual worlds, generative systems and online communities.

The network wasn't simply somewhere to show the work.

It became the material from which the work was made.

And the international infrastructure supporting these practices was growing too.

Ars Electronica in Linz had been bringing art, technology and society into dialogue since 1979. ZKM in Karlsruhe developed into one of the world's most significant institutions for media art. SIGGRAPH connected artists with advances in computer graphics, scientific research and industry. Festivals, universities and specialist centres developed their own communities, archives and critical discourse.

Digital art was developing something approaching an art world of its own.

The history was international.

But it remained gloriously fragmented.

When the computer disappeared into everyday life

There is another strand to this history which is easily overlooked because it belongs as much to design as to art.

For digital culture to become ubiquitous, computers had to stop feeling like computers.

Few people were more influential in that transition than British-born designer Sir Jony Ive.

Through his work at Apple across the iMac, iPod, iPhone, MacBook Air and iPad, Ive helped transform our physical relationship with digital technology. Computers became less intimidating, interfaces more intuitive and devices increasingly intimate.

The computer moved from the office to the home.

Then into our pockets.

And eventually into almost every waking moment of our lives.

This mattered enormously for artists.

The smartphone became a camera, editing suite, sketchbook, cinema, archive, gallery and distribution network simultaneously.

Images could be created, manipulated and transmitted globally from a single object held in the hand.

And something profound happened as a consequence.

For an earlier generation, working digitally had been a conscious decision.

For the generations that followed, the digital was simply there.

It had become the environment in which they grew up.

The machine becomes a collaborator

This is where the contemporary moment begins to reveal its deeper ancestry.

Generative art, machine learning and AI may appear to represent a dramatic rupture, but they return us to questions that were already being asked in the 1960s and 1970s.

What is authorship when the artist creates a rule rather than an image?

What happens when the machine produces an outcome the artist did not explicitly make?

Where does the artwork reside: in the output, the process, the system or the relationship between them?

Today those questions have become extraordinarily visible because the technology has entered everyday life.

Millions of people who had never previously encountered generative systems can now produce images through language. Artists are working with datasets, machine vision, artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual realities, blockchain, robotics and systems capable of responding to information in real time.

But the conceptual territory is surprisingly familiar.

Gordon Pask asked what happens when machines behave.

Vera Molnár asked what happens when rules generate images.

Harold Cohen asked what happens when a computer participates in drawing.

Rolf Gehlhaar asked what happens when the audience activates the work simply by entering a space.

Today's technologies make those questions newly urgent.

They did not invent them.

The technology has changed.

The question has not.

So what is Digitalism?

Digitalism is not simply another name for digital art.

Nor is it a claim that artists working with computers have suddenly appeared.

It describes a broader cultural condition in which digital technologies have ceased to be specialist tools and become the infrastructure through which contemporary life is experienced.

The artists associated with Digitalism work across AI, AR, VR, generative systems, digital photography, moving image, robotics, digital sculpture and hybrid forms that resist conventional classification.

Their common ground is not a medium.

It is an environment.

That is why Digitalism can be understood as an ism.

The history behind it is long, international and frequently overlooked. It runs through computer societies and art schools, broadcast technology and experimental music, CD-ROMs and browsers, universities and laboratories, games and networks, archives and obsolete machines.

It encompasses the artists who experimented with the machines, but also the engineers, designers and thinkers who changed what those machines could do, where they could take us and ultimately how we came to live with them.

Britain has been part of that history from the beginning.

But Digitalism belongs to no one country.

Perhaps that is entirely appropriate for an art movement born from a culture in which ideas, images and people increasingly move between physical and digital worlds without much concern for borders at all.

DIGITALISM, the exhibition at British Art Fair, does not therefore represent the moment digital art arrives.

It represents something more interesting:

the moment a history that has been 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 more than half a century of artistic experimentation collided with a world that had itself become digital.

The machines have changed.

The questions haven't.

And perhaps that is why this history feels less like a story about the past than an explanation of where we are now.

Rebekah Tolley
Producer and Curator
Spotlight: DIGITALISM
British Art Fair: 24–27 September 2026