Digital Artists to Know

Digital art is any artwork that uses digital technology as an essential part of how it is made or shown. That covers an enormous range, from a painting made with a stylus to a program that computes a new image every second, and those two things have about as much in common as an oil painting has with a mobile.

This guide covers artists working in the second tradition: where the medium is code, light or simulation, and the work is a process rather than a saved file. Every artist named here has work in Layer Curation, so the descriptions come from the work itself rather than from a press kit.

What counts as digital art?

Digital art is artwork that depends on digital technology in its creation or its presentation. The Victoria and Albert Museum describes it as the use of technology in creative thinking and art making, spanning a wide variety of mediums.

The category splits usefully in two. In the first, the computer is a tool that replaces a physical one: digital painting, digital photography, digital illustration. The output is a fixed image, and the medium is a means to it. In the second, the computer is the medium: the artwork is a system that runs, and what you see is that system executing rather than a record of it.

Both are digital art. The artists below work mainly in the second, which is the harder half to encounter properly, because a still or a video of a running work is a document of it rather than the thing itself.

Who are the most influential digital artists?

The most influential figures in code-based digital art are the ones who built the tools everyone else uses. That is unusual among art forms and it explains a lot about how the field behaves.

Casey Reas co-created Processing with Ben Fry in 2001, an open-source language written for visual artists rather than engineers, and founded the Processing Foundation in 2012. He has been a professor in UCLA's Department of Design Media Arts since 2003, and his work is held by the Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA, SFMOMA, the Centre Pompidou and the V&A. More artists came into computational work through Processing than through any art school.

Zach Lieberman co-created openFrameworks toward the same end, co-founded the School for Poetic Computation, and leads the Future Sketches group at the MIT Media Lab. His own work turns gesture, voice and movement into visual form through software he writes himself.

Karsten Schmidt, who works as toxi, began in the 8-bit demo scene in East Germany and has since written open-source libraries used across the field. He was an early contributor to Processing and has exhibited at MoMA, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Whitney.

Which digital artists work in code?

Code-based artists design a system and accept what it produces. The authorship sits in the rules rather than in any single output.

Leander Herzog has made real-time animation and web-based work since 2006, addressing digital ownership and the reach of technology into contemporary art. Anna Lucia trained as an engineer at the Technical University of Delft and writes software that both generates images and drives an embroidery machine; her Generations series was built from an algorithm derived from the work of the Gee's Bend quilters, and she has shown at Art Basel Miami and the Decentral Art Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Per Kristian Stoveland co-founded the Oslo studio Void and released The Harvest through Art Blocks. Josef Pelz holds a background in mathematical visualisation and built T3D, a toolkit that made 3D texture work available to people without graphics programming experience. Laurent Houdard is an algorithmic artist in Paris who publishes his code alongside the work.

JERES came to generative art from computer engineering and art history at the University of Michigan, making algorithmic work about existence and identity. Jason Ting makes generative animation influenced by James Turrell, Dan Flavin and Vera Molnar. Dominikus Baur is Professor for Generative Design and Creative AI at Hochschule Munich and works between data visualisation and generative form.

Which digital artists work with physical material?

A significant group makes digital art without simulation at all, filming real physical processes at scales the eye cannot reach. The work is digital because the camera and the screen are, not because the image was computed.

Rus Khasanov has built abstract images from liquid, pigment and light in front of a lens since 2011, working in the tension between chaos and order and using no CGI or AI. Roman De Giuli applies fluids and pigment to paper and films the reaction in 8K through a macro lens at extreme reproduction scales, so a few centimetres of paper reads as a landscape.

Yonkers Vidal places chemical compounds on glass and films the reaction, producing images that hold between the microscopic and the astronomic; he received an IRIS prize for best visual effects in 2023. Davy Evans works from Brighton, fusing analogue and digital technique with light and liquid to reproduce distortions found in nature.

Which digital artists work in real time and 3D?

Real-time artists build work that renders as you watch, usually in TouchDesigner or a game engine, so the piece is never the same twice and never finishes.

Newnome Beauton, the working name of Artem Grigorov, holds a doctorate in molecular biology and has used real-time rendering since 2019 to treat mathematical and biological systems as visual material. Growth, division and pattern formation appear in the work as behaviour rather than as illustration.

Nicolas Sassoon works with early computer imaging from Vancouver, building images out of pixel pattern and moire, drawn to that vocabulary for its limits as much as its qualities; he co-founded the collaborative projects SIGNALS and W-A-L-L-P-A-P-E-R-S. Anastasia Lapotko builds particle systems in TouchDesigner where millions of elements move by rules she sets, gathering into shapes that hold briefly and disperse.

Ali Phi is an Iranian-born transmedia artist in Toronto who founded the collective NULLSIGHT and curates TADAEX, the Tehran Annual Digital Art Exhibition, drawing on Persian motif and Middle Eastern ritual. Alycia Rainaud works as Malavida, making saturated surreal landscapes across printing, painting, 3D rendering and virtual reality. Hyojung Seo is a Korean media artist whose interactive work has shown at SIGGRAPH and the Kobe Biennale.

What is the difference between digital art and AI art?

Digital art is made by a person using digital tools. AI art is generated by a model trained on existing images, where the decisive work was done by that training process rather than by the person writing the prompt.

The distinction is about where the authorship sits. A generative artist can hand over the source code and it accounts for the work completely, including why the system can produce what it does and nothing else. Someone working with a stylus can show the layers. Neither is available for a prompt, because the decisive material came from a dataset the artist neither made nor, in most cases, licensed.

This matters to collectors and it matters to the artists in this guide, several of whom work deliberately without any generated material. Rus Khasanov, Roman De Giuli and Yonkers Vidal all state plainly that they use no CGI and no AI: their images come from physical processes filmed at close range.

Do digital artists get paid when their work is shown?

Usually not. The standard model across most digital art platforms is a one-time sale or a licence fee, after which the artist earns nothing regardless of how often the work is seen.

That is a structural problem specific to a medium where the work can be displayed indefinitely at no marginal cost. A painting sells once and hangs once. A digital work can hang in a thousand places at the same time, and in most arrangements the artist is paid as though it hangs in one.

Layer pays artists ongoing royalties for every second their work is on a wall, a model it calls ViewTime, so the subscription pays the artist continuously rather than once. Fully exclusive works earn a higher return per view. Layer for business applies the same model to hotels, offices and residences.

How do you start collecting digital art?

Start with the artist rather than the format. The questions worth asking are the ones that apply to any medium: whose work is this, what is their record, and does the piece hold up on a second and third viewing.

Then ask the questions specific to the medium. Does the work render live or is what you have a recording? If it renders, what does it need to run on, and what happens when that hardware is superseded? Is the source held anywhere? Museums acquiring computational work have been working through these questions for years, and the answers separate a durable acquisition from a file that stops opening.

The practical entry point is a curated collection rather than a single purchase, because it lets you live with a range of work before committing to one artist. That is the reasoning behind a subscription model, and it is closer to how taste develops than buying one piece in isolation.

How do you know if a digital artist is any good?

The signals are the same as in any medium, with one addition specific to code-based work: whether the artist built any of what they use.

Institutional record still counts. Work held by the Whitney, MoMA, SFMOMA, the Centre Pompidou or the V&A has passed a curatorial judgement. Teaching posts count, because the field's serious practitioners tend to teach. Auction record counts where it exists, though it is thinner here than in painting.

The tool-building signal is particular to this discipline. An artist who has written a library others depend on, as Reas, Lieberman, Schmidt and Pelz have, has demonstrated something a portfolio cannot: that they understand the medium well enough to extend it. In a field this young, that is a stronger indicator than a client list.

What should you look for in a digital art display?

The display is not showing a reproduction of a code-based work. It is the place the work happens, which makes the specification part of the viewing experience rather than a technical footnote.

Black level decides whether a dark composition reads as depth or as grey haze, and most of this work is dark. Colour gamut decides whether the palette the artist chose survives the trip to your wall. Processing power decides whether a complex system runs at full resolution or quietly drops detail to keep its frame rate. Refresh behaviour decides whether slow movement looks continuous or stepped.

Format matters too, and it is the one people overlook. Generative work is frequently composed to a square, because the form carries none of the cinematic convention that produced the 16:9 ratio. Shown on a widescreen panel, a square composition is either cropped or surrounded by bars, and neither is what the artist made.

Anything with a tuner, an app store, a microphone or a camera is a television that also shows pictures. That is a different product with different priorities, and the compromises show up in exactly the places this work is most sensitive.

Where can you see digital art properly?

Most code-based digital art is time-based, which makes it difficult to encounter in the formats art is usually reproduced in. A still is a photograph of it. A video file is a recording of one pass through a system built to continue.

Galleries and museums increasingly show this work on dedicated hardware for that reason, and the same problem applies at home. A television is engineered to decode and replay a video signal, which is the wrong job for an artwork that needs to be computed. Played back as a file, a running work becomes a loop, and the loop becomes visible.

The Layer Canvas was built for this: a 3.2 GHz CPU and GPU behind a museum-grade square panel, rendering generative work in real time rather than replaying it, with no tuner, no apps and no camera. Every artist named above is in Layer Curation. For the full roster see the Layer artists page, and what is generative art covers the discipline these artists work in.

Sources

Victoria and Albert Museum, Digital Art, vam.ac.uk/articles/digital-art. UCLA Department of Design Media Arts, faculty profile: Casey Reas, dma.ucla.edu/people/casey-reas. Artist biographies drawn from each artist's own site and institutional profiles, listed on their Layer artist pages.