What Frieze London Revealed About Digital Art

Digital art is often discussed as if it belongs somewhere beyond the physical world. At Frieze London 2024, some of the fair's most memorable technology-led works demonstrated the opposite. Screens, games, holograms, artificial intelligence and imaging software were not escapes from the exhibition space. They were ways of reshaping how that space could be felt.

Writing for The Art Newspaper, Louis Jebb selected five standout works that used artificial intelligence and other technologies across the fair. Together, they offer a useful snapshot of digital art moving beyond novelty and into a more mature relationship with storytelling, performance, archives and public participation.

Technology can change the pace of a room

At the LG OLED Lounge, John Akomfrah's five-channel video work Becoming Wind combined moving image, six surrounding speakers, music, chants and text. Its meditation on the Garden of Eden, human loss and climate change created a protected rhythm within the intensity of the fair.

The installation is a reminder that scale is not only about physical size. Multiple displays and spatial sound can hold attention by changing the pace of an environment. The technology becomes valuable because it gives the work duration, atmosphere and emotional range.

For creative studios and cultural commissioners, this is an important distinction. A screen can deliver information, but an orchestrated system of image and sound can create a world. The difference lies in composition: what the audience sees first, how long they stay and how each element behaves in relation to the room.

Digital work can still feel embodied

Jacolby Satterwhite's New World Order used animated holograms and a pulsing soundtrack to draw people toward the Kadel Willborn stand. The work developed ideas from A Metta Prayer, his 2023 multimedia commission for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inspired by a Buddhist mantra of loving kindness.

Holographic display can easily become a technical trick. Here, movement, circular form and sound gave the digital imagery a physical presence. The work did not need to imitate a conventional object to command space. It used light and animation as sculptural materials.

This is one of the most productive directions in creative technology: treating pixels, projection, sound and responsive media as materials with weight, rhythm and texture. The result is experienced with the body, even when the image itself cannot be touched.

AI is most interesting when its limits remain visible

Katja Novitskova's Pattern of Activation (Gardens of the Galaxy) assembled more than 1,500 AI-indexed screenshots into a rapidly moving slideshow. Her source material comes from technology's attempts to observe nature, including wildlife cameras and citizen-science imagery.

Presented alongside Earthware, a sculptural work featuring an automatically captured image of an antelope witnessing a distant wildfire, the installation placed machine vision beside the complexity it tries to classify. A text drawn from machine-learning research pointed to a central problem: as samples become easier to read, they can also become less diverse.

That tension is more meaningful than a simple celebration or rejection of AI. Classification systems make vast archives navigable, but their patterns are shaped by datasets, probabilities and choices. Artists can help audiences see those systems rather than presenting generated output as frictionless magic.

For institutions and brands working with AI, this offers a better creative brief. Instead of asking technology to imitate an established visual language, ask what the system notices, what it misses and how those decisions can become part of the story.

Software can expose the history inside an image

Jaime Welsh's photographs of the former Banco Nacional Ultramarino in Lisbon were reworked using imaging software. The building, created during Portugal's Estado Novo dictatorship and now restored as the home of the design museum Mude, carries a political history that renovation cannot simply erase.

Welsh's carefully constructed interiors demonstrate that digital manipulation does not have to remove context or polish away uncertainty. It can make an image feel less stable, directing attention toward architecture, power and memory.

The lesson extends beyond photography. Creative technology should not always make an experience smoother. Distortion, delay and artificiality can be deliberate tools when they help reveal what a seamless image would conceal.

A video game can also be public performance

Lawrence Lek's Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot, presented at the Frieze Artist Award stand, combined sculpture and a playable video game. Its AI carebot protagonist tends to self-driving cars while confronting recognisably human frustrations around labour and care.

Visitors could play or watch someone else take control. Lek observed that audiences for watching games can be as large as audiences for playing them, allowing the work to operate as performance and public art as well as interactive media.

This viewing mode is essential to good experience design. Not every visitor will want to touch, climb or control an artwork. Participation can include playing, observing, discussing and learning the rules through another person's actions. Designing for those different levels of confidence makes an interactive work more public, not less.

From digital features to coherent experiences

Across these five works, no single technology defines the art. OLED screens provide a field for cinematic storytelling. Holograms behave like sculpture. AI indexing becomes a subject of inquiry. Imaging software unsettles architectural memory. A game becomes a live performance.

What connects them is the clarity of the relationship between medium and idea. Technology is not added as proof of innovation; it is selected because it changes the form of the encounter.

This is the standard creative technology should aim for across art, culture and brand experience. The process begins with a human question: what should people feel, understand or do together? The technical system then earns its place by making that encounter possible.

At Diffused, we are interested in building at exactly this intersection—where creative direction, spatial thinking, interactive systems and production come together. Frieze London 2024 showed that digital art no longer needs to argue for its place in the physical fair. The more relevant question is how thoughtfully that place is designed.