Digital Sector

Since its creation three years ago, the Digital Sector has reflected the growing presence of digitalisation and AI in our lives. Why is it important to build bridges between emerging voices and historical figures?

Building bridges between generations is essential because the history of digital art cannot be separated from the history of photography. From the outset, photography has been a medium that constantly redefined itself through technological innovation – from chemical processes to electronic imaging, from scanners to the first computer-manipulated pictures. In this sense, digital art did not arrive from the outside but emerged from questions that were already embedded in photographic practice: questions about indexicality, authenticity, reproducibility, and the constructed nature of the image.

By placing historical figures in dialogue with emerging artists, the Digital Sector makes these continuities visible. It reminds us that every technological shift – whether the introduction of colour, the digital pixel, or now AI – has redefined what we understand as “photography”. Today, in the age of algorithms, networks, and machine vision, the photograph is no longer just a fixed trace of reality, but part of a broader ecology of images that circulate, mutate, and interact across platforms.

Creating intergenerational conversations shows how artists have long anticipated these transformations, and how new voices continue to challenge our perception of what photography can be. In this way, the Digital Sector does not only present new works – it also reflects on the evolving role of the image in the digital age.

What are the key ideas behind this year’s selection, and could you highlight three works that best illustrate them?

The 2025 Digital Sector brings together a wide range of artists and practices that reflect the expanded field of photography in the digital age. Conceived as a bridge between the history of photography and the future of the image, it highlights how digital practices expand the medium beyond traditional boundaries and shape the evolving ecology of images. Three works exemplify these ideas in different ways: Julieta Tarraubella with her genre-crossing installations, Kevin Abosch with his exploration of the synthetic image, and Luke Shannon with his scanner-based investigations of time and identity.

Julieta Tarraubella’s THE SECRET LIFE OF FLOWERS series unfolds as an audiovisual installation that takes the form of a “cyborg-garden”. Through mosaicked screens in time-lapse, the lifecycle of flowers – from bloom to decay – becomes a sculptural environment in which technology and nature are inseparably entwined. The work stages metamorphosis as both image and object, turning organic transformation into an artificial yet poetic presence. By expanding our perception of rhythm and duration, it challenges linear notions of time while reflecting on how the digital reshapes our understanding of growth, beauty, and mortality. The installation exemplifies how art in the digital age traverses the space between moving image, sculpture, and immersive environment.

While Tarraubella turns processes of organic transformation into immersive digital environments, Kevin Abosch addresses photography at the threshold of the synthetic.

Kevin Abosch’s ETHICAL WORK series affirms photography as a field of inquiry – one that now includes the synthetic (e.g. AI generated) as deliberately as the analogue or the digital. The series consists of synthetic photographs and generative video works created with diffusion models, yet remains deeply rooted in Abosch’s long photographic practice: thousands of his own images form the model’s training corpus. Rather than breaking with photography, these works position the synthetic photograph as part of its evolution – photographs made differently, yet guided by the same artistic and ethical commitments. By confronting unresolved questions of authorship, fabrication, and belief once the indexical link to reality has dissolved, they reaffirm the continued relevance of photography and challenges audiences to reconsider what constitutes a photographic image today. 

If Abosch shifts the discussion to the role of AI and the synthetic image, Luke Shannon retools a foundational apparatus of documentation to question time, perception, and identity.

Luke Shannon’s REPLACEMENT CHARACTER series draws on both historical and contemporary trajectories of photography. Like the photogram or early time-motion studies, it ties the photographic image directly to bodily presence and the passage of time. Using a custom-built plotter that maneuvers a flatbed scanner across a bed-sized surface, Shannon produces large-scale prints in which bodies pressed against glass appear both hyper-real and estranged, suspended between scientific time and subjective duration. Central to this practice is a paradoxical “surveillance of selfhood”: a process that records with perfect fidelity yet strips away context, creating images that are at once candid and distant, intimate and impersonal. At Paris Photo, the scanner itself will be presented in the booth, and visitors are invited to commission new works in collaboration with the artist – making the construction of identity part of their own lived encounter. In this way, Shannon expands the photographic vocabulary while situating it in dialogue with its history and with the audience of today.

As the Digital Sector explores photography and the image in the digital age and connects tradition with experimentation – do you see it as a kind of think tank for future practices?

The Digital Sector, created in 2023, was conceived as a space for innovation within the fair and as a bridge between tradition and future practices. Digital practices still occupy a marginal position in the traditional art world, even though digital technologies shape every aspect of our daily lives. By establishing this sector, Paris Photo became the first major European art fair to dedicate a focused platform to the artists, practices, and established and new cultural actors shaping art in the digital age – a move that signals an important shift: it acknowledges that digital forms of image-making are not peripheral, but integral to the present and future of photography.

At the same time, digital practices expand the very definition of photography. By moving fluidly across genres and media – from moving image to installation, from algorithmic work to blockchain-based formats – they open the field to a wider range of artists and exhibitors. This expanded perspective also broadens access for collectors and audiences, creating connections that extend beyond the traditional photographic canon.

The sector also responds to structural shifts in the art market. The traditional gallery model is under increasing pressure, while new approaches – from curated online platforms to hybrid models – gain importance. By giving these models access to the fair, the Digital Sector opens space for testing combined strategies of presentation and distribution. This also extends to audiences: the sector attracts new publics and reaches digital-native collectors who might not otherwise engage with the traditional art fair format.

Art has often been at the forefront of engaging with and testing new technologies – whether artificial intelligence, novel image-making processes, or blockchain, where art has frequently served as a concrete use case. In this sense, the Digital Sector does not only present works, but also provides a framework in which emerging technologies can be critically examined, adapted, and contextualised through artistic practice.