LACMA Digital Witness

At the end of November, another event in Getty’s PST ART opened, perhaps the most significant—Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film. The show is the successor show to LACMA’s 2023 Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982. Digital Witness picks up essentially where Coded left off, exploring the previous four decades of digital image manipulation and tracing its impact on photography, graphic design and visual effects. Featuring over 150 works by nearly 200 creators, the exhibition examines technology’s impact on digital aesthetics, realism and storytelling, highlighting the accessibility and influence of editing tools today. In this sense, the show is less about generativity per se but is still an important exhibition of digital art’s history. Tina Rivers Ryan mentioned the show specifically when referring to the end of 2024 and its “moment” for digital art.