Art of the Future: Innovative exhibitions to check out in 2023

The evolution of technology has continually walked in parallel with the progression of art history. With every advancement in technological development, art changes too. And this applies to the way art is viewed, communicated, consumed, and shared. The rise of social media and digital tools for instance, has made art way more accessible and common, and allowed the often secular art world to expand into a more diverse audience. 

In 2020 and 2021, NFTs and crypto art came into the limelight and propelled digital art into the mainstream art world with a demand that was previously unforeseen. In 2022, the rise of AI image generators such as Midjourney, Dall-E and Stable Diffusion, has also further pointed to a future where algorithms are inevitable. We can only expect the intermingling between art and technology to grow even more prevalent in the years to come, and some artists that are putting innovation at the forefront of their creations. Here are five art exhibitions around the world that offer a timely reflection on this ongoing blurring between the physical and digital in our post-humanistic existence.

“Hylozoism” at Hong Kong Design Institute, Hong Kong

December 3, 2022 – April 2, 2023

Hylozoism, also known as animism, is a doctrine held by early Greek philosophers that all matters in the world are in some sense alive. This ongoing exhibition at the Hong Kong Design Institute explores the symbiotic coexistence between arts and technology as an extension of how humans and nature interact. The five multimedia works gathered at the exhibition are reflective of the complex interdependence of the five elements of the universe, mirroring the intermingling, and constantly evolving ecology created  between humans, machines and nature.

The exhibition features five multidisciplinary artists, including revered Hong Kong video artists Ellen Pau, and Keith Lam who is also one of the curators of the show. They are both commissioned new works that explore the possibilities of intervening nature with art and technology. The rest of the lineup includes legendary Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto in collaboration with media artist Daito Manabe, Italian artist group fuse* and Canadian artist Philip Beesley.

“Machine Visions” at Osage Gallery, Hong Kong 

November 19, 2022 – February 4, 2023

Two visual arts professors from the Hong Kong Baptist University —  Peter AC Nelson and Roberto Alonso Trillo — teamed up with musician and creative technologist Marek Poliks to present a futuristic showcase, “Machine Visions”, at Hong Kong’s Osage Gallery.

The result of a two-year collaborative project at the university’s Augmented Creativity Lab, “Machine Visions” probes into a not-so-distant future dominated by artificial intelligence tools. The ongoing exhibition and performance series fuses various forms of art such as video, sound installations, paintings, sculptures, music and dance, using new creative artificial intelligence tools developed in Hong Kong.

Since the exhibition’s opening in November, the gallery has hosted a series of free music and dance performances that demonstrate the intermingling between art and technology and explore how artificial intelligence is impacting the world around us. “We hope to make a modest contribution to a rapidly evolving conversation about how AI is changing our approaches to creation — our most human trait,” said Nelson. The next and final performance will be staged at the gallery on January 14 (sign up here). 

“Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles

February 12 – July 2, 2023 

Throughout modern art history, art and technology have in many ways influenced and evolved to arrive at their place today — a digital age where they constantly overlap and produce new ideas. LACMA’s upcoming “Coded” exhibition dives into this rich history of digital and computer-generated art, going all the way back to the 1950s when they first emerged into public consciousness.

International and interdisciplinary in scope, “Coded” examines the origins of what we now call digital art, featuring artists, writers, musicians, choreographers, and filmmakers who worked directly with computers and algorithms to produce their work. The works on view reflected the sense of wonder and political alienation that characterizes the immediate postwar era, and the sense of possibilities — both utopian and dystopian — that the rise machines brought. In this time of digital ubiquity, it’s surely an interesting experience to look back on the years leading up to the advent of the personal computer.

“In Search of the Present” at Espoo Museum of Modern Art (EMMA), Finland

August 27, 2022 – January 15, 2023

Technology is often seen as the enemy of nature, and AI a threat to humanity. To the artists of “In Search of the Present”, however, technology is seen as an opportunity to visualize and understand ourselves and our relationship with nature better. “This show is not only about art and science, but about science that is partly real, partly speculative and partly imaginary,” says curator Arja Miller in a recent interview with Wallpaper.

The show’s title references Finnish author Olavi Paavolainen’s eponymous collection of essays from 1929 on humanity in rapidly changing times, and works by the 16 artists all explore the intersection between nature, technology and art. Among them is Turkish-American artist Refik Anadol, who uses machine learning to create mesmerizing data paintings and sculptures. Chinese-Canadian artist Sougwen Chung created a kinetic installation, which features a family of robotic arms painting her stream of consciousness, activated through a live meditation performance which links the neural pathways of the artist with a multi-robotic system. The resulting three paintings are displayed as part of the installation.

“Beeple: Human One” at M+, Hong Kong 

December 9, 2022 – April 30, 2023

Arguably the most famous NFT artist on earth, Mike Winkelmann, otherwise known as Beeple, pretty much changed the trajectory of contemporary art when his digital artwork, Everydays: the First 5000 Days, went under the hammer for a record-breaking US$69 million at Christie’s in March 2021. The event propelled him into overnight stardom and marked the beginning of a year-long NFT craze.

Last month, Winkelmann’s hybrid screen-based sculpture, Human One, was unveiled at M+, Hong Kong’s museum of visual culture, marking the artist's first solo presentation at a major institution in Asia. A seven-feet-tall spinning box-like structure depicting a space traveler-like lone figure, Human One is an example of a digital and physical or “phygital” artwork symbolizing the journey of the first-ever human figure born in and traversing through the metaverse. It's a poignant display of humankind’s increasingly hybrid existence with technology. Read our recent interview with Winkelmann here.