“Digital Witness”

Imagine an exhibition about the medium of watercolor. It would tell the story of the water-soluble natural dyes in cave paintings, and the marketing of non-toxic watercolors for children in the nineteenth century. It would include John Audubon’s birds and Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers alongside demonstrative pieces by Sunday painters and kindergarteners. Such a show might seem absurdly broad in scope, but also thrillingly enlightening. Only by seeing a medium from so many angles can viewers cultivate a stronger appreciation for it. Though a show like that would also be rife with confusing inclusions and omissions, as any project so sprawling tends to be. 

“Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film” is an exhibition about the digital as a medium, and it is every bit as ambitious, rewarding, and frustrating as you might expect. Organized by Britt Salvesen, head of LACMA’s photography department, and Staci Steinberger, a curator of decorative arts and design, “Digital Witness” covers an impressive interdisciplinary range of topics: the history of personal computing, CGI effects in film and television, the innovations in typography and print design brought about by desktop publishing software, and artistic uses of digital photo editing, to name a few. It’s an incredibly rich show, with more than 150 objects across seven galleries on two floors, that will leave viewers curious to learn more about this vast and unruly subject beyond the museum’s walls. But it lacks the kind of curatorial thesis that makes an exhibition a satisfying experience in itself. 

The show has many great moments. Vitrines with spreads of Wired, Ray Gun, and Emigre magazines show how designers working between the pasteboard and the software window devised new ways to structure the page. Rebecca Allen’s entrancing film Steps (1982) simulates human motion with colorful volumes moving in a black void. In Vibeke Sorensen’s NLoops (1989), charmingly colorful pixelated shapes and glyphs split apart and reform across nine channels. A mini-exhibition collects album covers by design firm Pen & Pixel, who created a distinctive look by collaging clip art and gemlike 3D fonts with photos of hip-hop artists in fancy cars. There’s plenty of pop-culture eye candy, often gathered in looping video anthologies that play on monitors stationed throughout the show. On one, a 1986 commercial for Cherry Coke and the video for “You Might Think” by The Cars, released two years earlier, exemplify the use of software to composite film and graphics in discrete layers of moving images. On another, the title sequences for Fight Club (1999) and “Severance” (2022) offer examples of CGI that simulates liquid to disorient the viewer with slippery environments of constant flow. 

Videos like these show how digital media can organize space in layers or integrate graphics and footage to make seamless illusions. “Digital Witness” could have guided the audience through such effects and how they evolved over time. Its section titles—Blur and Sharpen, Morph and Warp, Cut and Paste—gesture toward that possibility. But the exhibits aren’t organized consistently around these operations. Everything feels interchangeable. “Digital Witness” begins with a nod to chronology, displaying Susan Kare’s 1983 sketches for Apple’s graphic user icons, the boxes that contained the disks for an early edition of Adobe Photoshop, and other artifacts of early personal computing. But works and clips from various decades are mixed together in this and other galleries, and there’s virtually no attention to software environments after the ’90s. 

Excellent catalog essays by Briar Levit on the digitization of graphic design and by Carolyn L. Kane on the development of digital aesthetics offer illuminating historical insights, but the exhibition itself gives the sense that Salvesen and Steinberger produced more research than they could synthesize. The dozen interviews with artists and visual effects specialists in the catalog are not conversations about the particular contributions of these people but responses to a questionnaire: What is your earliest memory of manipulating digital images? Is there a “digital aesthetic”? This again reflects a curatorial agenda to unspool the threads of the digital rather than weave them together. A generous assessment would conclude that “Digital Witness” is structured around a kind of read-write protocol that prompts its audience to find their own connections. A stingier viewer would conclude that this project is not yet finished. 

For all its flaws, “Digital Witness” is a historically significant show. Since the turn of the century, many museums have staged exhibitions about art and technology that treat the digital as a theme or a topic rather than taking it seriously as a medium. The digital, like any medium, can be thought of as a material with intrinsic properties and behaviors that artists work with to produce certain aesthetic effects, but this understanding has largely been the province of visual effects specialists, designers, and hobbyists. Curators and art historians, meanwhile, have tended to focus on the digital as a media environment that artists address as theorists do. 

Happily, in the last two years this has started to change. Solo exhibitions of Harold Cohen at the Whitney Museum and Auriea Harvey at the Museum of the Moving Image demonstrated how these artists’ engagement with the digital evolved over time and manifested in various forms. “The Living End,” curated by Jamillah James at MCA Chicago, explored the development of artistic uses of digital media through dialogues with painting, while “Electric Op,” curated by Tina Rivers Ryan at the Buffalo AKG Museum, presented Op art, early video art, and computer art as contemporaneous investigations of the materiality of screens and how media is experienced through them. Though I did not have a chance to see it, “Coded,” a 2023 show at LACMA, examined the relationship between computer-generated art and painting and sculpture from the 1950s to the ’80s.1 

These shows charted specific courses through the history of digital media. “Digital Witness” takes on everything at once. It does the necessary work of thinking through the digital in all its manifestations, which is a suitable task for an encyclopedic museum like LACMA. It also convincingly makes a case that the digital medium—unlike, say, watercolors—is so ubiquitous in everyday life that its use by artists cannot be fully appreciated in isolation from design, entertainment, and personal computing. If “Digital Witness” takes on too much, it’s because museums have been slow to take on the digital at all. It opens up many pathways for further exploration. Let’s hope other museums follow them.