Digital arts practice in the time of the pandemic

Alex May gave Digital arts practice in the time of the pandemic on 21 July 2020, a free online talk organised by students from the Digital Media Arts MA at the University of Brighton as part of their week-long Hexagonally programme. The event addressed the practical and conceptual problems facing artists at a moment when galleries and museums were closed, physical exhibitions were suspended, and digital circulation had become newly urgent.

Rather than treating the shift online as a simple technical adjustment, May used the talk to ask what happens to context, attention, and artistic control when work is distributed through networked platforms. He discussed new projects developed during lockdown, ways of making existing works accessible to remote audiences, and the risks of relying on channels that flatten meaning or encourage art to circulate as disposable content. That made the talk less a stopgap response to crisis than a sharper account of how digital art is framed, encountered, and valued.

The event also reflected May’s wider practice and teaching. Across installations, virtual reality, algorithmic images, and networked works, he repeatedly returns to questions of mediation, memory, and how technologies shape what can be experienced or retained. In the context of the pandemic, those concerns became immediate and infrastructural, bringing artistic method and distribution politics into the same conversation.