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.

This conversation explores how artistic practice can expose, misuse, and rewire the interfaces that shape our digital lives. From corporate infrastructures to legal frameworks, net art has long challenged the invisible rules embedded in technology, asking what it means to make art inside, against, and beyond the system.

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.

From the earliest CGI experiments of the 1970s to today's AI-generated environments, this conversation traces how artists have built, imagined, and inhabited virtual worlds. It explores the continuities and ruptures between early computer graphics, game engines, virtual reality, and machine learning, asking what it means to create a world when the tools themselves are generative.