Art Basel examines women shaping digital art’s future

Christiane Paul, the curator who taught institutions how to read digital art, sits in a room with a generation of artists who barely existed in those early conversations: IX Shells, Kiya Tadele, Emi Kusano, Sofia Garcia. They work with tools their predecessors could not have imagined. Art Basel’s new film, Women in New Media, the third episode in the series Decoding Art in the Digital Era made with UBS, traces what happens when the people who shaped a medium’s past meet those remaking it now, and asks a question that changes how art history gets written: whose work gets seen, supported, remembered and collected.

The episode moves between moments in the medium’s development. Paul’s role was foundational: she spent decades explaining digital art to collectors and institutions when few understood what it was. The artists alongside her work at the frontier of algorithmic systems, generative tools and technology-driven platforms that emerged only in the last five years. Some build communities and find audiences through methods that would have seemed impossible to the practitioners who came before. What emerges is not a single narrative but several overlapping ones, each revealing how recognition in digital art has depended on proximity and timing: who was in the room when the medium became legible to power. Women who arrived early often spent their energy explaining the field itself rather than being recognised for what they innovated within it.

The film gives equal weight to the collectors whose purchasing decisions and taste actively reshape the market for digital work. Collection is a form of curation and memory. Who chooses to buy and preserve a work determines which artists enter the historical record and which disappear. Michael Spalter and Matthew Newton frame the broader context, their presence acknowledging that the question of recognition structures how the entire field is understood and valued, not only for women but across the medium itself.

What distinguishes the approach is its refusal to treat digital art as spectacle. The film allows the artists and their thinking to speak directly, granting the kind of sustained, serious engagement with contemporary practice that has become rare in writing about either the digital or the contemporary. The episode is available on artbasel.com alongside the earlier chapters of the series and additional resources exploring digital art’s wider landscape.

Michael Spalter and Matthew Newton, both central figures in understanding how digital art circulates and gains value, help frame the broader context. Their presence acknowledges that the question of recognition is not one women artists face alone, but one that structures how the entire field is understood and valued.

The film sits within a larger inquiry. The series Decoding Art in the Digital Era began by asking what digital art actually is now, then moved to questions of value and market. Women in New Media broadens the frame further, asking who holds the authority to define the field and whose work survives within it. It is a necessary question for a medium still establishing its own history.

What distinguishes this approach is its refusal to treat digital art as spectacle or novelty. Rather than extracting soundbites or reducing practice to a series of innovations, the film treats the artists and their thinking seriously, allowing their work and decisions to speak directly. This kind of sustained, thoughtful engagement with contemporary practice has become less common in writing about either the digital or the contemporary.

The episode is available on artbasel.com, alongside the earlier chapters of the series and additional resources exploring digital art’s wider landscape. For anyone trying to understand how art is made, valued and remembered in the present moment, it offers the kind of serious framework that institutions have only recently begun to develop.

Imagery courtesy of Art Basel (@artbasel).