"Immaterial/Re-material: A Brief History of Computing Art"

When UCCA’s director Philip Tinari commissioned us a large historical exhibition on digital art based on the Guy& Myriam Ullens digital art collection, it was planned to take place in February 2020. “Immaterial/Re-material: A brief history of Computing art” opened finally on September 26^th, rescheduled because of the Covid outbreak. Meanwhile, the subject of the show had taken another dimension: during the Covid crisis, computers turned to be the center of our lives, in all the fields of human activities. Most of our social and economics interactions survived thanks to computing communication softwares for instance. Artificial Intelligence brought a significant support to pass this crisis. To present today an exhibition dedicated to artworks all made with computers (from the 1960’s till today) is indeed more relevant than ever. The artists we present were very creative during this crisis, inventing new forms and images, as they were not cut from their art medium: the computer code. The computing material of most of the works allowed also the artists to successfully install the show through a complete remote process. We could manage to install a very complex exhibition (2500 square meters, the largest show ever on his topic) without travelling to Beijing. The artists could control the details of their works from their own computer, sometimes located at the other bottom of the world – the show presents 30 artists from some twenty countries. Of course, all that would have never been possible also without the incredible team of UCCA, so supportive and so professional.

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