By Will Fenstermaker, February 10, 2025
On November 21, 1995, the ambient musician Brian Eno recorded his first recurring dream about Adobe Photoshop. “I dreamed I was erasing my past,” he wrote in his diary, “but it turned out that I was using the ‘clone tool’—so instead of erasing I was just copying chunks of the past into the future.” History repeats itself, as it’s always done, but now it returns as pure aesthetic: its forms copied, its politics tamed. What better analogy for the digital age?
“‘Digital Witness’: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film” is Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s contribution to Pacific Standard Time, a citywide initiative whose theme this year is “Art and Science Collide.” With over 200 exhibited artists, LACMA provides a compelling overview of four instrumental decades while introducing many local artists whose work remains under-recognized. Despite the admirable heterogeneity, the result is a narrative that reads too neatly in parallel to the rampant greed-is-good corporatism that’s now corrupted the libertarian idealism of pre-Y2K digital culture. For every impressive early digital undertaking, like Trici Venola’s Little Egypt (1998)—an 8-bit-color frieze of Egyptian hieroglyphs commissioned as an Apple ad—there are uninspired examples, like the opening credits to David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), that do little more than dutifully demonstrate CGI’s predominance in our visual environment.
Adobe Photoshop, released in 1990 as the internet went mainstream, is positioned here as Pandora’s box. The exhibition lays out a rubric of “creativity versus standardization” and “human authorship versus automation”—themes that feel, frankly, copied and pasted from landmark digital-art shows from the previous decade, such as MoMA’s “Thinking Machines” and ICA Boston’s “Art in the Age of the Internet.” Still, “Digital Witness” makes a strong case with sharp pairings, such as the music video for Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” (1991), in which singers’ faces morph seamlessly into one another, displayed near a demo of Unreal, a contemporary 3D-graphics engine for high-fidelity video games. Situated on the survey’s introductory wall, the juxtaposition efficiently conveys a common trajectory for creative technologies, from fine art to popular culture to established industry.
Twentieth-century digital art was intentionally crude, existing outside of accepted visual taste, meant to be easily disseminated—yet it ignited a quest for fidelity even among its early practitioners, who sought to legitimize it by associating computers (like cameras) with verisimilitude. Photographers Lucas Blalock, Thomas Ruff, and Andreas Gursky—who relish employing “a variety of digital vocabularies,” as the wall text vaguely reads—are placed in conversation with works like Jean-Paul Goude’s Grace Revised and Updated (1985), in which the artist composited an idealized version of the model and actor Grace Jones. Little synthesis is offered, despite the projects’ vastly different aims. Likewise, the designer April Greiman, a CalArts colleague of Nam June Paik, pioneered a disorienting collage aesthetic throughout the 1970s and ’80s that combined modernist typography with bright neon colors and computer graphics. Alongside Jayme Odgers, Valerie Green, Neelon Crawford, and other early digital designers, Greiman’s radical style established certain leitmotifs for years to come, going from transgressive to dominant to antiquated in just a couple decades. By the 2010s, artists knowingly simulated that style in kitschy works that reek of vaporwave—a nostalgic pop-culture movement that attempted to incorporate the initial cyberpunk spirit within the sleekly designed and standardized internet we’re now forced to navigate.
A historiographic undercurrent pervades with the inclusion of advertisements, movie trailers, and early Macintoshes, all the way through the final galleries, which touch on the sudden advent of generative art, NFTs, and artificial intelligence. That utopian premise—a cybernetic era of free exchange—is wielded as an origin myth for the rising caste of tech oligarchs. Under its cover, a system of dark patterns, addictive behaviors, and unparalleled surveillance has so far defined the new millennium. LACMA’s exhibition, like the tech industry at large, has fallen prey to the false sense of inevitability underwriting its own narrative of progress. We are, in fact, more than witnesses; the internet, to paraphrase the late anthropologist and activist David Graeber, is something we made, and could just as easily make differently.
Will Fenstermaker is an art critic and contributing writer for Frieze magazine living in Los Angeles.
APRIL GREIMAN, Pacific Wave poster, 1987. © April Greiman, digital image © Museum Associates/LACMA
MANUAL (Suzanne Bloom and Ed Hill), Natural, 1988, from the series After Nature, 1988. © MANUAL (Suzanne Bloom and Ed Hill), photo courtesy of Moody Gallery
NATALIE KRICK, My Best Body, © Natalie Krick and courtesy of the artist.
THOMAS RUFF, Substrate, 2003. © Thomas Ruff courtesy of The Broad Foundation.