There was a period, not long ago, when you could follow digital art by watching two or three marketplaces and one annual conference. That period is over, and the evidence is that somebody now has to publish a calendar.
“New Histories: Previewing Autumn 2026 in Art and Technology”, by Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) for Le Random on September 14, 2026, surveys the season from Armory week in New York to ISEA Dubai, with monthly highlights and an event calendar attached.
Who’s in it
The piece is organised around people rather than objects, which is the more useful cut. Among those featured:
- Corinna Gardner — senior curator of design and digital at the V&A, one of the few people holding a major museum’s position on collecting software.
- Michael Spalter — of the Anne and Michael Spalter Digital Art Collection, the private collection that has done the most to establish a canon for early computer art.
- Leyla Fakhr — curator and advisor.
- Erick Calderon (Snowfro) — founder of Art Blocks, and effectively the person who defined what a generative art release looks like.
- Sofia Garcia, Lowbie, and quasimatt.
That list is itself the argument. A curator from a national museum, a private collector whose holdings run from 1960s plotter drawings forward, a platform founder, and working artists — in one preview, treated as participants in the same season. Five years ago those were four separate conversations that barely acknowledged each other.
The title is the thesis
“New Histories.” Bauman is pointing at something real: the current institutional energy in digital art is substantially retrospective. The Toledo Museum of Art’s Infinite Images survey, the V&A’s collecting, the Spalter collection’s continued influence — the field is spending this moment establishing where it came from.
That is what a discipline does when it stops arguing about whether it exists. Canon formation is a late-stage activity, and it is being done now, in public, by a small number of curators and collectors whose choices will be load-bearing for decades. Which is a good reason to know their names.
What it’s useful for
Practically: if you make work in this field, the calendar tells you which openings, fairs and symposia to plan around for the rest of the year, and the profiles tell you whose programmes are worth approaching. That’s not glamorous but it’s the actual function of a season preview.
More broadly it’s a decent corrective to the way this scene is usually described from outside — as a market story with art attached. A preview that leads with a V&A curator and a private collection of plotter drawings is describing a different field than the one in the headlines, and a more accurate one.
Read alongside Le Random’s recent interviews — Agnieszka Kurant, John Provencher, A.A. Murakami — it’s a fairly complete picture of what the institution-facing half of generative art is thinking about this autumn.