For the latest installment of Tiffany & Co.’s New Ways of Seeing video series leading up to the Whitney Biennial this spring, the brand commissioned writer-actress Tavi Gavinson to explore the importance of digital artists.
Titled “Digital as Medium” and premiering here on the Cut, the above clip is the third episode in the series to explore art-related topics. In this video, Gevinson speaks with four artists about how social media and technology have changed the way people consume and create art. “The museum is now our feed,” she says while typing away at her laptop. “And the internet is not only an archive of artworks that exist elsewhere in their official form, but its own medium.”
Each artist shows off their signature medium as Gevinson moves between white-walled rooms and examines each piece. Digital artist Petra Cortright uses webcam software to make moving pictures. Austin Lee mixes Photoshop with painting. Cory Arcangel “hacks” and decodes computer-generated images to rearrange technology into art, while Douglas Coupland utilizes facial-recognition software to obscure a subject’s face.
“It’s just another color in the world of reality, fantasy, and human connection that art has explored for centuries,” Gevinson says of digital art. “These are new answers to old questions.”