Digital art is a crowded field. It’s also now older than I am. Yet despite a 50-year courtship, art galleries have been reluctant to allow it more than a toehold in their collections. Things are changing. Take MoMA’s visit to Paris last year. Alongside the Picassos and Pollocks was a very popular final room, made up of a single, beautiful computer-generated animation, in which a huddle of humans tramp across a constantly disintegrating landscape. ‘Emissaries’ (2015–17) is the work of the 33-year-old artist Ian Cheng, who two weeks ago opened his first show in the UK at the Serpentine Gallery.
Cheng’s first inspirations were video games like The Sims, and working in special effects on Pirates of the Caribbean. ‘They were trying to simulate a whirlpool that was like several kilometres wide, and they were trying to simulate it water particle for water particle… It was just like mind-boggling — just that they attempt to do that was very beautiful.
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