While digital art has existed since the 1960s, it has experienced increasingly mainstream interest in recent years. Due in part to our shift toward virtual environments during the Covid-19 pandemic, this rise in interest from artists to collectors has also been fueled by the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Featuring works by Kenneth Wayne Alexander II, Karl Erickson, Coe Lapossy, Sarai Payne, and Anthony Sims, Another Dimension provides a glimpse into the emerging digital art scene in Memphis. This exhibition explores the ways in which digital mediums open up a new range of possibilities for artists, from creating virtual environments to reaching new, global audiences, and how artists can create alternative physical and psychological spaces in the digital realm.
Over the past twenty years, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art has showcased digital art. In 2002, the museum commissioned video art pioneer Nam June Paik to create his towering work Vide-O-Belisk. Paik’s early adoption of analog video and the use of television sets as art objects in the early 1960s prefigured the utilization of digital media and tools by artists two decades later and even the way we continue to engage with digital technologies today. In 2015, the Brooks hosted the dynamic exhibition The Art of the Video Game organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which traversed the 40-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium. Another Dimension: Digital Art in Memphis builds on this legacy.
