Is digital art coming of age under Covid?

Art anywhere

But handheld digital screens are not the bigger picture in terms of display. The platform enables the streaming of artworks onto any digital screen or canvas anywhere in the world.

Anders believes Covid-19 has sped up the growth of digital art, and that technology holds the key to the future of the art sector.

He has a deep background in display technology, and one of Niio’s partners is Samsung. Co-founder Oren Moshe is an academic at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design.

“Oren is one of the leading pioneers in product and user experience, but also comes from the art academies over here,” says Anders.

Anders sees digital art as offering a space where people can stop and think, providing an oasis from digital noise. “Everywhere you go, it’s advertising and information being thrown at you, kids living in their screens,” he says.

“We give people a chance to stop for a moment and have an additional experience, which might give you a place to ask some questions or stimulate some thinking.”

Digital showcase

On the supply side of the platform, Anders says it sees more and more digital artists emerging, but “a total lack of a dedicated unified platform and repository” which could enable these works to be showcased and brought to the world.

“They [the artists] are a unique bunch, very particular about how they work. You need to build a technology platform which will deal with the secure distribution, with appropriate licensing of this content, which can eventually be displayed on any type of screen or projector, in place of a painting on the wall. So, it has to be really robust.”

As for the art, the need to ensure scarcity is crucial. This is not a new problem. In his famous 1935 essay The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, the German-Jewish Marxist intellectual Walter Benjamin thought through the “problem” of reproducibility – with lithography and then photography – of fine art. Mechanical reproduction reduced the “aura” of a work of art, but did not abolish its “unique existence at the place where it happens to be”.

In the digital age, the technological reproducibility problem becomes worse, exponentially so. Moreover, in terms of the creation of art, anyone with a smartphone can create digital imagery and video and upload them to social media, as cultural artefacts – which can then be copied ad infinitum, albeit not always legally.

“The art world,” says Anders, “defines itself as ‘something I have that someone else doesn’t’. And because of that, the traditional model for video art has been limited editions. You’d go to a gallery, buy video art, get a contract, get a box with a USB. And you have your certificate declaring your ownership – say you are owner one of seven. And that’s the inherent value. We have been able to replicate that but enhance it using digital technology, whereby artists can upload their original artwork and create the limited edition on our platform.”

Creative evolution

With the Covid period, worldwide, Anders says: “There is a whole open dialogue about the future of arts and culture. About how people will discover and consume art, even physical art, using digital tools.”

And, indeed, galleries and museums have stepped up their digital efforts to develop and improve their virtual gallery tours. Georgia Haseldine, public engagement fellow for the Victoria and Albert Museum, gives a critical account of these tours in the June 2020 issue of the art magazine Apollo. Museums covered in her piece include the Rijksmuseum, the Courtauld Gallery, and the Museo Frida Kahlo. And she notes that in “April this year the Getty released an ‘Art Generator’ for players to upload chosen artworks from the museum’s collection to Animal Crossing, a Nintendo game created by Katsuya Eguchi”.

So there is, evidently, a confluence, or an inter-animation at play between traditional art and digital media. But to what extent is it realistic to think that a digital platform like Niio can emulate Spotify?

“We’ve got our eyes wide open and we understand where the market is relative to music. People don’t wake up in the morning and say, ‘I want digital art’.”

And so Niio has a staged approach, aiming at gigantic screens in hotels, airports and corporate offices to begin with, but with an eye to a user subscription model. It believes the AI in the platform will crunch data on genres, formats, locations of where the art is displayed, emotional response readable from consumption, and so on will enable the content to be matched to users.

Why, finally, is the company called Niio? “On the one side you have the prefix “neo” in different movements like neoliberalism, or neoclassicism. And then there is Neo from The Matrix, and I think his character sums up really well what we stand for. It’s under that bridge between being accepted and credible within the traditional art world but being kind of cool and revolutionary.

“We don’t want to be pure art, but we want to be acknowledged and loved by the art world. The logo is really our symbol, philosophically speaking. It could be horizontal or vertical, it could be abstract or make up a word. That’s what we do – we fit into different industries and connect people in an interesting way. I’m about to get the logo tattooed – that’s how meaningful it is,” he concludes.