!DIGITAL ART
Round table with Dr. Lev Manovich, Mónica Rikić, Ioana Vreme Moser, Lukas Truniger and Marc Vilanova.
Technology is part of our everyday lives and of the way we understand the world. Yet some people are still surprised to see it in museums. “I’m more into classical art!” But what does that actually mean? Why is there sometimes such a blunt resistance to technological languages? What language could be better suited to speaking about the present than one that is also helping to shape it?
Artists are tired of having to justify whether a work that uses technology is art at all—what it does or does not do, and what it is supposedly for. Perhaps the issue is not with the works themselves, but with structures and aesthetic expectations that still treat these languages as an exception.
Working with technology means embracing other materials, other timeframes, and other ways of producing, conserving, exhibiting and mediating art. It also means adapting spaces, equipment and institutions to works that may behave, fail, connect, or require maintenance. Technology is not an artistic genre, nor an anomaly that needs to be justified. It is a tool, a material, an extension of our ability to imagine, build and question the world.
This conversation brings together artists and thinkers with extensive experience in the field, from different generations and places, to discuss how these practices are produced, exhibited and perceived in different contexts—and what would need to change, both within and beyond the field, to stop placing them in a category of their own.
It is time to finally move beyond the category of “digital art” as a separate compartment. The challenge now is for institutions, critical discourse and our own expectations to catch up with the present.
And for us to finally stop asking whether it is art.
It is art.
Participants
Lev Manovich is a writer, artist and theorist of digital culture. His work has been fundamental in understanding how software, data and media technologies shape contemporary visual culture. He is the author of The Language of New Media and founder of the Cultural Analytics Lab.
Mónica Rikić is an electronic artist and creative coder based in Barcelona. Her practice explores technology through playful, critical and often hands-on situations, creating installations and devices that question our relationship with intelligent systems.
Ioana Vreme Moser is a Romanian-born artist working with hardware, electronics and sound. Her work examines the material and ecological realities behind technological systems, often through fragile, speculative and experimental machines.
Lukas Truniger is a Swiss artist and creative technologist whose work explores the poetic and spatial possibilities of computation. Together with artist Bruce Yoder, he presents Implausible Rainbows, an installation that transforms light, code and perception into a shared environment.
Marc Vilanova is an artist and researcher working at the intersection of sound, technology and ecology. His installations make invisible phenomena audible and tangible, inviting us to reconsider how we listen to the natural and technological worlds.
About Responsive Dreams
Responsive Dreams is an international festival of generative art, creative coding and digital culture, organised by The Generative Art Museum at Roca Umbert Fàbrica de les Arts in Granollers. Through exhibitions, installations, performances and conversations, the festival brings together artists who use code and technology as living materials—works that evolve, respond, connect and sometimes misbehave.