Digital path of Venice Biennale 6 | Antonio Geusa: How do we conceptualise NFT?

Throughout decades the Venice Biennale has been witnessing and hosting various steps of digital art in its evolution. In the 1960s, the Venice Biennale prize was awarded to the international network and movement New Tendencies created in Zagreb in 1968, which according to scholars Jussi Parikka and Darko Fritz was at the time “the only long-term initiative” that “started to contextualise digital art within contemporary art with a historical discourse”.

Later on in 1970, 35th Venice Biennale was featuring computer art by showing Running Cola by a Japanese collective of art and engineering students The Computer Technique Group founded by Masao Kohmura and Haruki Tsuchiya, which according to Jussy Parrika and Darko Fritz were believed to be “one of the earliest examples of the computer image morphing technique”. Descendants of the post-war generation, they were positioning themselves as a think tank aiming to “deliberate carefully the relationships between human beings and machines” by a “strategic collaboration with artists, scientists” without falling into praising or criticising the computer era.

In 1986, when the Venice Biennale was focused on art and science, the presence of digital media, in the framework of Laboratoria Ubrica curated by Roy Ascott, Tom Sherman, and Tommaso Trini presented Planetary Network, which was a worldwide computer network–slow-scan TV project with participants from all over the world. The pictures and faxes that were created in the process were then exchanged between different continents and the texts were sent via the medium of ARTEX. The project was questioning the very principles of an established art system of museums and galleries. Its results, as Ascott later mentioned in his book Das Gesamtdatenwerk (1989) “broadened the scope and possibly the nature of individual creativity” by activating “a whole stream of interactive communications media” including “electronic mail, computer conferences, videotext, slow scan TV” and various kinds of interfaces.

In the early 2000s, the Venice Biennale was among major art events that according to the philosopher and specialist on digital art Hervé Fischer ‘reignited the debate over the state of the arts’ and the return of traditional and digital arts towards craftsmanship.

The 59th Biennale in 2022 celebrated a new milestone of digital art by featuring 200 NFT artworks at the Decental Art Pavillion. The Digital Odyssey summed up the preliminary results of the development and transformation of digital art over the past almost six decades since mid 1960s. That year's Biennale definitely inscribed artificial intelligence and phygitals into the context of contemporary art.

 Will Follow The Ship by Matthew Attard, 2024

However, as noticed by art critics, the current 60th Biennale of 2024 lacks a visible input of digital art, with an exception of Malta pavilion project I Will Follow The Ship by Matthew Attard curated by Elyse Tonna and Sara Dolfi Agostini. Attard’s artwork lies on the intersection between the physical and digital realms. He even shares the credits of the project with a machine—an eye-tracker. By comparing old anonymous ship drawings with contemporary digital drawing Attard invites us to reflect on the shifts of power in the era of latest computer technologies.

Reflecting the contemporary era, the Venice Biennale has made several attempts to approach digital art over more than half a century, sometimes in juxtaposition with different disciplines. One way or another, digital art, constantly changing predicates and names, is as imminent as climate change, and its waves have already reached the threshold of the exhibition halls.

Read more:

Histories of Post-Digital: 1960 and 1970s Media Art Snapshots
Jussi Parikka, Darko Fritz. Edited by Ekmel Ertan.
The catalogue of the exhibition curated by Ekmel Ertan and Darko Fritz, took place at Akbank Sanat between 17th December 2014 and 21st February 2015.

At a Distance. Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet
Edited by Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark.
2005 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2005.