Enter the Madness

You thought the 2010s were wild? This decade is only a few years old, yet we’ve still never seen anything like this rapid pace of change and influx of interest. How? Why did it all come together in 2020? Perhaps that explanation starts how the decade began, with a debilitating global pandemic. But this is actually the end of the explanation, the final chapter. Refer to the previous 9 chapters of this Timeline and over 900 moments that describe and explain the technological and artistic developments that have led us here, from our earliest explorations of systems-based art-making to how digital technology and mass media art accelerated these developments in conjuncture with our digitizing lives.

For more context, we suggest [watching or listening (transcript) to our Ch 10 Artist Discussion with Lauren Lee McCarthy, Snowfro, Ix Shells and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.]

But this 70,000-year story always had a twist coming at the end. Decades of advancements in computer science and AI research combined with our inexhaustible human capacity to intervene, experiment and create with emerging technologies led to a decade poised for disruption. Then, almost as soon as the decade began, a global pandemic hit. Increased time at home and stimulus liquidity fanned the embers we covered in chapters 1 through 9, igniting an NFT-mania.

This sudden and new-found popularity for digital, on-chain and generative art would have seemed unimaginable for people who had been working in these fields for decades in relative obscurity. These quiet builders have now become the heroes of this story, which is by no means winding down with this chapter. Paradoxically, unlike a traditional narrative, this story doesn’t end here and may only be beginning. Erick Calderon, a particular hero of this chapter, told the Le Random team more about the pandemic’s impact on “2020s: Digital Art’s Normalization.”

“For the last couple decades, we’ve seen this inevitable shift towards a more digital-focused world. We spend more of our lives online. And as a result, we value our digital possessions more than we did in the past. That’s something that was coming for a really long time.

The pandemic just helped everyone get there, or at least for me personally. It was pre-pandemic, post-pandemic in terms of how I crossed that chasm of understanding how much our time in the digital space impacts and affects us as humans, psychologically, emotionally, all those things.”

Seth Goldstein from Bright Moments also explained to me the impact of the pandemic:

“It’s not an accident that we started after the pandemic. The pandemic was a really raw time where we were all alone making stuff behind our computers. Bright Moments didn’t have any legacy business to support. We didn’t have existing galleries. We just saw the opportunity to bring people together.”