The Wallet and the World

Opening Superposition

The digital art world has built up enormous speed over the past few years. New tools appear almost weekly, platforms come and go, and the scene keeps searching for a way out of its own isolation. It circles around itself and tries, through a handful of players, to dock onto the “classical” art world. The once-celebrated separateness of this market is over; the impulse now is to interlock with the world that still claims the space of meaning and interpretation for itself. It is a question of borders, but the view from within onto one’s own contour grows blurrier. From a market perspective, this may be evolution. A survival strategy. But this is not the market argument I want to make.

After several years of collecting digitally, the contact I had naturally built with many of the artists grew, and through it I came to see something I had not expected: that this contact is no less central in the digital art world than in the classical one.

The greatest advantage of a thing is often also its greatest disadvantage. I can collect art on the blockchain directly and without intermediaries, regardless of location, whether the artist is my neighbour or working on the other side of the world. But without an encounter with the artist, something remains empty. The wallet can hold the work, but not the world from which it came.

I firmly believe that we are all only collecting shards. Works are fragments. They never stand for what is on the surface. At best, they are entrances into the very personal world of an artist, whose complexity we cannot fully grasp. But we should still try to meet it.

That can of course happen digitally. But the IRL experience with people whose output one collects, whose output fills a gap in oneself that it was never meant to fill, is part of collecting too. I do not believe we collect works alone. I believe we enter into a connection with an extraordinary complexity, one that the works can only hint at. Whoever wants to understand what art truly is has to take the path into the complexity of these people. Whether they must always be physical beings remains to be seen; once digital intelligences also experience suffering, wear and age, that may change. On verra!

This question of encounter shifts when digital works themselves seek a physical correspondence. Because then it is not only how a work enters the world that changes, but also where and how the person behind the work becomes visible at all.

Between the worlds of “art on the blockchain” and “art in physical space,” there is no empty space. Something of its own takes shape there.

It is precisely this in-between that draws me.

I am interested in works that are born digital and still find a physical correspondence. Works that do not simply translate a digital piece into an object, but exist in both states at once — that hold a superposition. Artistic positions that belong neither fully to the classical art world nor fully to a purely digital culture, because this dual condition is part of the work itself, not part of its presentation. Perhaps a new form of contemporary art has emerged precisely there, one for which we do not yet have a precise language.

I am not interested in a nostalgic defence of the classical art world, and just as little in technological euphoria. I am interested in the friction between them. The threshold. The in-between.

This series is therefore meant to do more than show works. It is meant to make positions visible. To accompany artists. To observe how their work develops. To draw connections. Between digital and physical. Between technology and biography. Between the work and the person.

Because it may be precisely there that a new way of understanding art begins.