The Greatest Digital Artists of the 21st Century

These digital artists are pushing the boundaries of technology the likes of which has never before been seen in the art world.

May 15, 2015
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Complex Original

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

If “Internet art” was an obscure term even a decade ago, these days it’s mainstream. Artists working with digital media are popping up everywhere from major museums to the biggest auction houses in the world. As the art market establishes a demand for work by digital-native artists, the question becomes, do they have staying power, or is art driven by new technologies a fad that will sooner or later come to a close?

Yet, looking at the work of individual artists known for their tech-forward practices, it’s clear that not only is great art being made, but artists are also showing us just what technology can do, whether it’s sensing our emotions through heartbeats or dazzling our eyes. Here are 10 artists who are actively proving the staying power of digital art, this year and over the next decade of creative innovation.

Kyle McDonald

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Location: New York

Website: kylemcdonald.net 

New York-based Kyle McDonald describes himself as an artist who “works in the open with code,” but that doesn’t begin to describe his wide-ranging practice. From hacking retail stores full of computers to helping build open-source creative coding platforms like OpenFrameworks, McDonald has a hand in every aspect of the digital art world. With his consistent collaborator Lauren McCarthy, McDonald recently created “pplkpr,” (pronounced ‘people-keeper’), a watch-like device that senses its users’ emotions and automatically guides their social lives, “unfriending” acquaintances who might not bring the most positive vibes.

Sara Ludy

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Location: Vancouver/Los Angeles

Website: saraludy.com 

Vancouver- and Los Angeles-based artist Sara Ludy performs magic tricks with pixels. Ludy’s work is a kind of ambient music for the Internet—she creates animated GIFs and 3D renderings that reference the visual lexicon of virtual space. In her recent project, Vapors, for the digital art platform New Hive, Ludy developed a series of digital scent bombs that perfume the Web.

Sterling Crispin

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Location: Los Angeles

Website: sterlingcrispin.com 

Los Angeles-based artist Sterling Crispin investigates our surveillance culture in the post-Snowden era, bringing it to light through research, visualization, and 3D printing. With his “Data Mask” series, Crispin turns Facebook’s face-recognition equation on its head, algorithmically rendering images and sculptures that look like faces, but aren’t quite right. It’s a critique of technology’s impact on our lives. When computers turn our identities into numbers, “the kind of softness, the part that’s really human, is lost in all of this,” Crispin told Matter.

Addie Wagenknecht

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Location: New York

Website: placesiveneverbeen.com



Marking her as one of the stars of the burgeoning digital art market, Addie Wagenknecht’s “Asymmetric Love Number 2,” an angular chandelier made of security cameras, sold for $16,000 at the watershed Paddles ON! auction in 2013. The New York- and Austria-based artist describes her work as investigating “the tension between expression and technology.” Wagenknecht works in paint, drones, and circuit boards to make us more aware of our digital surroundings.



Jesse Darling

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Location: London

Website: bravenewwhat.tumblr.com

As a participant in the London collective Kitson Road Living Project, Jesse Darling makes work that engages the wider world. Whether it’s taking on gender politics or rising rents in the city, Darling is an interdisciplinary crusader. Her videos and sculptures appropriate the detritus of modern life—Styrofoam, Internet memes, scribbled text—into a critical artistic whole.

James George

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Location: Brooklyn 

Website: jamesgeorge.org/

James George is a pioneer not just in creating art, but also in overturning how we see the world through technology. Beginning with his work that uses the infrared-sensing Kinect camera to film video of city streets that looks like what an alien would film on vacation, George has developed a new aesthetic driven by depth data translated into pixels. It’s a new form of imaging—called computational photography—that promises to be the future of vision.

JODI

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Location: Netherlands

Website: Jodi.org

An artistic duo based in the Netherlands, JODI is one of the pioneers of digital art. With their glitched-out, broken-HTML websites and installations that often mock the functional uses of technology—they once slapped a keyboard on top of a skateboard—JODI shows us that we sometimes take our devices far too seriously. The pair hack video games like Quake and run amok with apps, forever subverting our expectations of what technology does for us. Instead, it’s often the viewer who is struggling against the instabilities of technology.

Manfred Mohr

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Location: New York 

Website: emohr.com

Digital art doesn’t always take place on a screen. German-born, New York-based artist Manfred Mohr was “a pioneer of the digital art genre,” the gallery that represents him writes. Mohr was one of the first artists to use algorithm-driven computers to create his drawings. The result is series of drawings that turn minute variations into visual poetry. “Creative work is an algorithm which represents a human behavior in a given situation,” he wrote back in 1971. The insight is just as fresh today, as so many of our behaviors online and off are shaped by programmatic equations.

Phillip David Stearns

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Location: New York 

Website: phillipstearns.com



Glitch art is what happens when technology rebels. Neither humans nor computers are perfect, and when an error creeps into the system, the results are both frightening and inspiring. New York-based artist Phillip David Stearns has turned digital glitches into visual feasts. By converting between file formats and running data through his own custom filters, Stearns turns images into pixelated explosions that he then weaves into blankets and rugs, turning the digital into physical.



Kari Altmann

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Location: New York 

Website: karialtmann.com

If Web 1.0 was all about Geocities and hand-coded border frames, and Web 2.0 is slick interfaces and minimalist websites, what is the dominant style of Web 3.0? New York-based artist Kari Altmann appropriates everything from cheesy 3D renderings to Silicon Valley’s logo lexicon to both mount a critique on and participate in the way images flow through the Internet. Her videos are a hallucinatory adventure into the back-end of the Web.

Rosa Menkman

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Location: London

Website: rosa-menkman.blogspot.com

Author of the influential “Glitch Manifesto,” the Dutch artist Rosa Menkman focuses on “visual artifacts created by accidents in both digital and analog media,” as she puts it. In her work, accidents happen on purpose, however. Images become fields of fragmented pixel noise and faces break apart, become digital ghosts. Perhaps Menkman sees what the Internet will be like when we’re all long gone.

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