Practitioners such as Simon Denny, Chris Dorland, Sara Ludy and Jenna Basso Pietrobon are doing thought-provoking, transmedia work while being offline and online simultaneously.
At a moment when all online images are flowing into one machine-learning algorithm or another, it is easy to foresee the convergence of old canons of painting, photography, and film into an undifferentiated field of digital "slop". Notwithstanding the implications for the precarious life of the cultural producer, this state of artificial intelligence (AI) affairs also augurs a world in which humans lack oversight over the production of images, which increasingly emerge from the latent space of accumulated data in AI models.
A number of artists have sought to halt the onset of consequent cultural blindness by calling attention to the ways technical systems shape social realities. The new machine-assisted painting by Simon Denny, who was recently appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, address the "illegibility" of image generation in the age of AI, when history is all "jumbled up". the artist's two new series, presented with the gallery Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler at the JW Marriott Hotel Berlin, overlooking a hub for the German Ministry of Defence, play on the militarised rhetoric of Italian Futurism as well as cubism's attempt to capture multiple perspectives simultaneously.
For Denny, “there is no such thing as offline and online, we’re always both,” which heightens the relevance of the historical avant-garde to a world of multi-channel experience as well as to a moment of rearmament in Europe. By using mechanical plotters to execute his paintings, Denny not only highlights generative AI as a machine for manufacturing history, he also aligns the canon of painting with that of computational art. In the process, he embraces the hybrid reality of an art world where both analogue and digital media live together, one that is crying out for work that embraces plurality without being nebulous.
Denny is not alone in treating painting as one strand of a wider transmedia strategy. The California-born artist Sara Ludy has built a career engineering porousness between media: from sculpture to video to virtual reality. Her recent exhibition of paintings at Smart Objects, Los Angeles, expressed the lingering effects of screen-based experience on life lived in the New Mexico desert. In a recent interview, she acknowledged painting through a “postdigital” lens: “The way I perceive light, space, and surface is shaped by years spent working in that [screen-centred] realm. Even if I’m not actively engaging with digital tools, that lens is embedded in how I see and make.”
Of course, that lens is also financialised, politicised, and militarised, which has prompted the German media artist and film-maker Hito Steyerl to ask, with the release of her new book Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat (2025): “In an age where most images have become operational, what can an inoperative image be?” With machine learning now being used to enhance the precision and autonomy of drone operations, artists are helping to maintain public focus on the opaque domain of nonhuman vision. For the Montreal-born New York-based artist Chris Dorland, “Art can’t necessarily stop the machinery, but it can expose its limits Technical error becomes a rupture in the smooth interface — a break in the fantasy.” The title of his recent exhibition at Nicoletti Contemporary, Clone Repo (server ruin) refers to the practice of downloading files stored online to a local hard drive. Bathed in the glow of its central LED monolith displaying degraded screen grabs from Tik Tok and Instagram against a “dead server sound bath” by Leon Louder, the show appeals to the urge to evade systems of surveillance. It also relocates glitch aesthetics from the screen to a new series of paintings, subverting one form of seduction after another while validating multimedia practice.
Even a painter’s painter such as the Canadian-American Tim Kent has absorbed digital modes of visualisation, building compositions out of vector graphics that stress the Cartesian roots of military viewfinders. Kent was part of Fever Dream, a group show in May at Studio Underground, New York, curated by Julianna Vezzetti and Xandra Beverlin, whose works register as postdigital aftershocks. A case in point is the California-born Petra Cortright, whose contributions to the show included a painting on anodized aluminium titled Athos adress Internet communication_bank foreclosures banjo-kazooie stratagy (2021) that turns a greyscale grid into an emergent field of indeterminate flora and fauna.
If such works exemplify painting from a digital place, the London-based Diana Taylor’s forthcoming show of paintings at DON'T LOOK Projects, Los Angeles, comes from the opposite direction. Layering the graphical matrix of Gustave Doré’s engravings together with a surfeit of other patterns over a pixellated bitmap, the artist makes legible the collapse of analogue and digital organising principles that AI obscures.