While Digital Art might conjure up associations with software, screens, or the internet, the exhibition DIGITAL DELUGE presents the surprising diversity and development of this art movement. Some artists in the show use their work to celebrate the infinite possibilities generated by digitalization, while others explore the very effects that these have had on society. The exhibition’s title, borrowed from a work by Noor Nuyten, refers to the incessant flow of digital information that has changed our outlook on the world forever.
The exhibition starts with the work of Peter Struycken: as ‘the father of digital art’ in the Netherlands, he was among the first artists to start using the computer for his work in the late 1960s. During the 1990s, with the rise of the Internet, digital art began to gain momentum. Jan Robert Leegte, Rafaël Rozendaal, and Constant Dullaart can be considered alongside Harm van den Dorpel as pioneers in the field of Internet art. For them, the digital is not only a medium, but a central topic as well. Rozendaal sees, for instance, abstract patterns in website interfaces and has the screenshots of these woven into a tapestry. Leegte transposes the flow of information generated by the Internet into meditative images, while Dullaart acts as a kind of digital archaeologist, focusing on the history and the impact of the medium. How algorithms might remove the artist from the equation is demonstrated by Van den Dorpel’s hypnotic NFTs, whose forms can ultimately leave him surprised as well.
Sarah Księska and Jen Liu concentrate on where the digital world leads us. Księska’s delicate paintings come into existence as sketches on the screen and come across on their smooth aluminum supports as an elusive interim world. In a cartoon-esque manner, Liu depicts the way we become entangled among screens and computers. Work by Noor Nuyten and Saskia Noor van Imhoff shows, among other things, that art rooted in the digital age is not, by definition, limited to the virtual. For Van Imhoff, the digitalization of sound waves is an archiving method that at the same time evokes enigmatic images. Nuyten, on the other hand, gives visual expression to our relationship with digital devices by aestheticizes energy waves into a sculpture.
With artworks by: Harm van den Dorpel, Constant Dullaart, David Jablonowski, Jan Robert Leegte, Saskia Noor van Imhoff, Jen Liu, Noor Nuyten, Rafaël Rozendaal en Peter Struycken.
