DIGITALARTSUMMIT 2026

Collecting digital art is an act of trust. Trust in artists, in technologies, and in futures that are still unfolding. This conversation offers an intimate look into the motivations, relationships, and long-term commitments behind building a digital art collection. Beyond transactions and trends, it explores how taste is formed over time and how collectors live with artworks that evolve, persist, and sometimes resist ownership.

How does a digital artwork move from visibility to permanence? This panel examines how masterpieces are formed through exhibitions, critical discourse, institutional support, and market recognition. Rather than treating canon as a fixed list, the discussion focuses on canon formation as a dynamic process shaped by context, repetition, and time, and asks who and what ultimately determine cultural endurance in digital art.

Before "AI agent" became a category, artists were already building systems that acted, generated, and decided without a human hand guiding each move. From early biometric composites and algorithmic scores to on-chain protocols that execute in live markets, some practitioners have spent decades inside the question of what it means to give a system agency. This panel traces that longer history and asks what it looks like now. As autonomous agents negotiate, transact, and create at scale, and as protocols replace authorial intention with executable code, the conversation turns to those who were working here first: what did autonomy mean then, and what does it demand today?

In the 1960s, movements like New Tendencies positioned computation, systems, and experimentation at the heart of artistic practice. Today, those experiments continue inside research centers, scientific institutions, and corporate labs. This panel traces a lineage between early digital art exhibitions and contemporary tech labs, asking how innovation, authorship, and cultural power have shifted as experimentation moved from artist collectives to large-scale infrastructures.

Since the early days of the web, artists have used the internet as both medium and subject, challenging platforms, protocols, and systems of control. This panel brings together pioneers of NetArt whose experimental practices helped define how art could exist within, and critique, the digital networks shaping contemporary culture.