From Canvas to Code: How Creative Tech Is exhibited at Frieze

When Frieze London returns to Regent’s Park this October, one of its more interesting intersections between art and technology may come not from artificial intelligence or virtual reality, but from something far more familiar: the small LED screens once mounted to the roofs of New York taxis.

Amsterdam gallery diez will present artist Jessica Wilson as part of Focus, Frieze London’s section dedicated to younger galleries and experimental artistic practices.

Wilson’s work sits somewhere between animation, sculpture, software and installation. Rather than treating digital technology simply as a tool for producing images, she gives the infrastructure itself a physical presence.

Frieze has highlighted her work Sweet Nothing (2025–26), an installation constructed from as many as twelve repurposed LED taxi-top displays, custom mapping software and computer-generated animation playing continuously.

The screens were originally designed for advertising — pieces of commercial infrastructure intended to capture a few seconds of attention as taxis moved through a city. Removed from that context, their function changes.

The display is no longer trying to sell something.

It becomes the object being observed.

Making the invisible physical

There is a tendency to think about digital art as something that exists primarily behind glass: rendered on a monitor, projected onto a wall or generated somewhere inside a computer.

Wilson’s practice complicates that distinction.

Her work examines what happens when the systems surrounding digital media — screens, networks, advertising technology and software — are treated as physical material.

In Sweet Nothing, animations move across objects that already carry their own technological history. The hardware has previously travelled through public space broadcasting targeted messages. Wilson repurposes it, combining its industrial function with new computer-generated imagery and behaviours.

The result exists somewhere between media object and sculpture.

SculptureCenter describes Wilson’s wider practice as exploring the physical and sensory effects of virtual systems through animation, installation, light, colour and space. In its forthcoming In Practice exhibition, the institution describes the discarded taxi displays as being given an imagined interior life, with animations exposing something resembling the machines’ own internal processing.

It is an interesting reversal.

Instead of technology disappearing seamlessly into an experience, the machine becomes visible again.

From canvas to code

Wilson’s presence at Frieze also reflects a broader shift in contemporary creative practice.

Artists increasingly have access to many of the same tools used by creative technologists, game developers and digital designers: real-time graphics, sensors, custom software, computer-generated environments, machine learning and programmable displays.

But the most interesting work rarely uses technology simply because it is new.

It asks what those technologies mean once they have become part of everyday life.

A discarded taxi screen can say something about advertising, attention, infrastructure and digital culture precisely because the technology itself is no longer futuristic. It is ordinary.

At Frieze London 2026, that distinction may prove increasingly important.

The conversation around technology and art is moving beyond whether something was “made with AI” or whether an artwork can be described as digital.

The more interesting question is what happens when code, hardware and computational systems become materials in the same way artists have historically used paint, metal, film or photography.

Jessica Wilson’s work offers one answer.

The screen is no longer simply where the artwork appears.

The screen is part of the artwork itself.

Jessica Wilson is represented by Amsterdam-based gallery diez, which returns to the Focus section of Frieze London 2026. Frieze London takes place at The Regent’s Park from 14–18 October 2026.