Digital Artifacts

The work of five internationally renowned artists and contemporary digital culture in a wholly new way, from the perspective of future archeologists uncovering its remnants.

Digital Artifacts brings together the work of five internationally renowned artists to consider contemporary digital culture in a wholly new way—from the perspective of future archeologists uncovering its remnants. Featuring new and recent acquisitions from the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation, the exhibition emphasizes the material aspects of technology in a field that, as Thoma Foundation curator Jason Foumberg notes, “increasingly prioritizes simulated experiences in immaterial spaces, as in online communities or multi-player video games.” The Foundation’s digital art collection is one of the foremost in the United States, and the only one open to the public in the Southwest. Bucking the trend toward rapid acceleration that structures most exhibitions of its kind, Digital Artifacts pauses to ask why technology defines our future, and what we can learn by looking to our past.

Artists Michal Rovner, Casey Reas, Guillermo Galindo, Josh Tonsfeldt, and Sabrina Gschwandtner imagine our present moment as that past, adapting the conventions of collecting, preservation, documentation, and display more often associated with natural history museums than high tech.