Why Digital Art Still Has a Body

December 24, 2025 Gavin Coates

Why Digital Art Still Has a Body

Since the emergence of digital technologies in artistic practice, digital art has often been described as immaterial. Files appear weightless, infinitely reproducible, and detached from physical constraints. This language reflects a broader cultural tendency to equate the digital with the intangible, as though code exists outside the conditions that govern other forms of production.

Art history offers a corrective. No medium has ever been without material consequence. Even practices that appear dematerialized, conceptual instructions, performance scores, sound works, have always relied on physical systems for their existence and preservation. Digital art is no exception. Its apparent immateriality obscures a dense network of hardware, infrastructure, and labor that constitutes its body.

This distinction matters now because digital work increasingly enters institutional contexts designed for physical objects. Misunderstanding its material realities leads to misjudgment, misclassification, and premature disappearance from the historical record.

Digital art exists through material substrates. Servers store files. Energy powers networks. Screens render images. Software versions age and become obsolete. None of these conditions are neutral. They shape how work is produced, encountered, conserved, and evaluated.

Historically, new media have always been accompanied by debates about legitimacy and permanence. Photography was initially dismissed as mechanical. Video was considered unstable and peripheral. Over time, institutions developed methods for conserving and contextualizing these media, acknowledging their physical requirements.

Digital art occupies a similar position. Its “body” is distributed rather than singular, consisting of devices, formats, and systems that enable visibility. A digital work without stable hosting, documentation, or clear authorship is not immaterial; it is fragile.

To speak of digital art as bodiless is therefore inaccurate. It has a body, it is simply less visible than canvas or stone.

The misconception of immateriality creates a structural vulnerability. When digital art is treated as endlessly reproducible and self-sustaining, responsibility for preservation becomes diffuse. Artists assume platforms will persist. Institutions assume files can be migrated indefinitely. In reality, both assumptions are precarious.

For living artists, this misunderstanding has tangible consequences. Work disappears when hosting services shut down, formats become unreadable, or documentation is insufficient. Evaluation becomes inconsistent because material conditions are unarticulated. Digital practices are often judged against physical standards without being afforded equivalent infrastructural support.

Gatekeeping operates through neglect rather than exclusion. Institutions may accept digital work in principle while lacking the means to care for it properly. The result is selective preservation and uneven historical presence.

The false narrative is that digital art exists everywhere. In practice, it often exists nowhere durably.

For artists working digitally, acknowledging material reality is not a concession to tradition. It is an assertion of authorship. Decisions about format, hosting, display, and documentation determine whether work can be encountered beyond its initial release.

This requires confronting tradeoffs. Proprietary platforms offer visibility but little permanence. Self-hosted solutions demand technical and financial resources. Institutions impose standards that may feel misaligned with digital culture but provide continuity.

Ignoring these realities does not preserve artistic freedom; it exposes work to erasure. Artists who understand the physical criteria by which digital work is judged are better positioned to negotiate how their practice enters public and historical space.

Historically, media achieve legitimacy when institutions adapt to their material needs. Conservation protocols, archival standards, and exhibition practices emerge through sustained engagement.

Naturalist Gallery operates within this adaptive role. Its approach treats digital work as requiring the same clarity of record and contextual framing as any other medium. By emphasizing documentation, authorship, and continuity, the gallery addresses the vulnerabilities created by the illusion of immateriality.

In this framework, digital art is not elevated by novelty, nor diminished by difference. It is situated as a practice with specific material conditions that must be acknowledged if work is to endure.

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Digital art still has a body because art has always had one. The materials may be distributed, mediated, and mutable, but they are no less real.

As digital practices continue to evolve, the challenge is not to free them from material constraints, but to recognize those constraints clearly. Institutions that provide stable contexts for preservation and interpretation make this recognition possible.

Immateriality is a myth. What remains is responsibility.

Learn more About Naturalist Gallery of Contemporary Art.