A round table asks why digital art still has to justify itself

Some people are still surprised to see technology in a museum. "I'm more into classical art!" The round table at this year's Responsive Dreams wants to take the question apart: why does a work made with code still have to justify itself as art at all?

The conversation brings together artists and thinkers from different generations and places. Lev Manovich, Marc Vilanova, Lukas Truniger, Mónica Rikić and Ioana Vreme Moser sit down on Friday 25 September at Nau Dents de Serra, inside the Roca Umbert complex in Granollers, twenty minutes up the train line from Barcelona.

The thesis is plain. Working with technology means other materials, other timeframes, other ways of producing, conserving and exhibiting. Technology is not a genre and not an anomaly. It is a tool and a material, an extension of the ability to imagine, build and question the world.

The organizers have a name for the category itself: crossed out, with a single correction underneath. It is not a separate compartment. The challenge is for institutions, critical discourse and our own expectations to catch up with the present.

The round table closes with two sentences worth carrying home. "And for us to finally stop asking whether it is art. It is art."

Friday 25 September, 18:00, at Responsive Dreams in Granollers. Free with registration. https://creativecoding.barcelona/event/not-digital-art/register

■ Filed from The Observatory: the discourse wing of the city.