The Rise of Digitalism: A New Movement in Art
By Rebekah Tolley, Curator of PIVOTAL: Digitalism (2024) and DBA: Digitalism at British Art Fair (2025), Saatchi Gallery, London
April 2025
In 2024, working with an advisory team of digital luminaries — Lol Sargent, Peter Higgins, Tom Roope, Jacqui Kenny, Jack Hardiker, and Tom Cullen — I had the pleasure of producing and curating PIVOTAL: Digitalism — the first section in the 36-year history of British Art Fair dedicated to this emerging field. The exhibition not only brought digital arts into the spotlight, it also launched Digitalism as a movement.
PIVOTAL marked a bold step into the future, celebrating artists working across a broad range of digital practices in ways that responded to contemporary concerns and timeless artistic questions. The reception was overwhelming: audiences were engaged, collectors were curious, and the press took note. Digitalism had arrived.
Now in 2025, this section returns to British Art Fair with its successor: DBA: Digitalism — a curated platform that expands and deepens the conversation. Not merely a passing trend, but a fundamental cultural shift.
A brief history of the Digital in Art
While the term Digitalism might be new — and frankly, long overdue — the roots of digital art stretch back decades, to the early days of computing and media experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s: from Nam June Paik’s pioneering video installations to Vera Molnár’s algorithmic drawings. By the 1990s, a wave of artists, coders, and theorists were laying the foundations of today’s digital culture.
In the 1960s, British visionaries like Roy Ascott were already decades ahead in imagining what digital and telematic art could become. Ascott’s work in cybernetics, behavioural aesthetics, and networked creativity reframed art as an evolving, participatory process. In his own words:
“Art is not a thing — it is a way of being in the world.”
“We do not need a new technology so much as we need a new perception of what technology can be.”
In early 1990s London, collectives such as Antirom were experimenting with interactivity, code, and multimedia in ways that broke from linear storytelling and passive spectatorship. Their anti-aesthetic approach felt more like art happenings than software demos.
At the same time, thinkers like Sadie Plant were reframing the digital conversation. In Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture, Plant explored how women, code, and cybernetic logic were entangled, showing that the digital was not neutral, but deeply ideological.
Prior to the new millennium, Peter Gabriel’s, Real World Multimedia studio (founded in the late 1980s) released Ceremony of Innocence CD-ROM, a haunting, multi-award-winning interactive narrative based on Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine trilogy. It was one of the first digital artworks to marry tactile design, narrative depth, and sound into a poetic multimedia experience. It proved that digital media wasn’t just functional — it could be emotional, symbolic, and profoundly human.
Digital art — then and now — is not merely about pixels. It’s about perception, power, and play. It’s about storytelling and speculation, and how we see ourselves and each other in the digital age.
What is Digitalism?
Digitalism isn’t just about using technology to create art — it’s about how art, culture, and technology are intertwined in the digital era.
It reflects how artists born into a post-internet, post-social media, post-truth age are making sense of reality through tools native to their experience: AR, AI, VR, generative algorithms, synthetic photography, digital performance, blockchain provenance, and hybrid installations.
It responds to the social and philosophical shifts brought about by the internet, ubiquitous media, and the increasing presence of technology in every facet of life. Digitalist artists aren’t simply using digital tools — they’re critiquing, subverting, and reimagining them.
They move between platforms, disciplines, and dimensions — often blending the physical and the virtual into experiences that can’t be contained by traditional white cubes.
Digitalism embraces the questions we must now ask of our times:
How do we define reality? What is authorship in an age of algorithms? And what role does the artist play in shaping our future digital mythologies?
From PIVOTAL to DBA: A Movement Evolves
At British Art Fair’s PIVOTAL: Digitalism in 2024, we saw how hungry audiences were for digital work with rigour, thought, and craft.
Artists like Untold Garden, David Sheldrick, Cem Hasimi, Sam Nutt & Cansu Sezer (among others) revealed what’s possible when advanced technology meets emotional and intellectual depth.
Collectors came. Critics came. Traditional art lovers came. And something clicked.
With DBA: Digitalism, we continue this journey with a new line-up, new provocations, and new stories.
DBA stands for Digital British Art — a nod to the YBAs of the 1990s (Young British Artists) and a declaration that the next radical wave is here — and it’s digital.
Why it Matters — and Why Now
In our post-pandemic world, digital tools are no longer optional extras — they are integral to how we live, connect, and create. Artists born into a digitally saturated environment are producing work that is native to these spaces.
Crucially, Digitalism embraces what the early internet promised but rarely delivered: connection, collaboration, and co-creation.
We are living through an era of AI acceleration, cultural fragmentation, and identity redefinition. Art has always responded to technological and societal change, and Digitalism is no exception.
It’s not just about art. It’s about how we learn, heal, communicate, protest, and play. It’s a new lens through which to view the world — one that affects education, mental health, politics, and personal identity.
To echo Ascott once more:
“The artist’s role is not to show us what we already know, but to help us see the world anew.”
Digitalism embodies this ethos. It’s time we embraced it — not as a trend, but as a transformation.
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Rebekah Tolley is the curator of PIVOTAL: Digitalism (2024) and DBA: Digitalism at British Art Fair (2025). With a background in film, digital culture, and visual storytelling, she champions emerging forms and voices in the contemporary art landscape.
DBA: Digitalism at British Art Fair
Saatchi Gallery, London
25 – 28 September 2025
