ARTEX — A Living Medium for Evolving Art
An early CODAME exploration into the future of living digital art
Every medium begins before it has a final form. It begins when a few people, often coming from different worlds, start sensing the same absence and are drawn toward the same possibility. Painters once imagined oil on canvas not simply as a technique, but as a way of holding light, matter, and time. Filmmakers imagined moving images before cinema had fully become itself. Digital artists, in their own way, imagined that code could become more than instruction — that it could become texture, rhythm, atmosphere, and expression.
ARTEX is the current working title for an emerging artistic exploration into how digital artworks might live, evolve, and remain present over time.
It is also an open invitation to artists, hackers, designers, and technologists who feel called to explore this language with us.
This exploration was initiated by Bruno Fonzi , with early creative collaboration from Anna Sapelnikova, Giovanni Muzio (Kesson), Lorenzo Gecchelin, and Alessandro Merletti De Palo.
A Living Medium
For centuries, art has often arrived to us as something still. A painting, a sculpture, a photograph: each one holding a gesture, a vision, a moment suspended. There is something beautiful in that stillness. It allows us to return, to look again, and to discover that what does not move can still change within us.
And yet digital art introduced another condition. It opened extraordinary possibilities, but it also introduced a new fragility. Software ages. Devices disappear. Formats become unreadable. A work may continue to exist in theory, yet lose the very environment that allows it to live. That is why, beneath the excitement surrounding digital art, there is often a quieter question, especially from artists, collectors, and caretakers of culture: will this work still be here in twenty years? Will it still breathe in 2036? Will it remain accessible, visible, meaningful?
This exploration begins there, with that question, but it does not answer it defensively. It answers by imagining another possibility: that a digital artwork might not be treated only as a fragile file temporarily hosted by technology, but as part of a living medium designed to persist, adapt, and endure.
In this vision, the work is not trapped in a single static state. It can unfold slowly. It can respond to the light in a room, to the sound of a space, to the subtle presence of a person passing nearby. It does not need to become theatrical in order to feel alive. What matters is not spectacle, but presence — a quiet life within the artwork, faithful to the artist’s language, yet open to time.
Time and Digital Art
Time has always belonged to art, though not always in the same way. Sometimes time enters through decay, sometimes through memory, sometimes through ritual, repetition, or narrative. But in digital art, time often arrives with a particular tension: the work may be conceptually alive, while technically vulnerable. It depends on systems that are themselves impermanent.
Some artists have chosen to make that impermanence part of the work itself. In Enough by Daniele Sigalot, a digital counter slowly approaches zero, moving toward an ending inscribed within the piece. Its disappearance is not a flaw, nor a technical problem to be solved. It is part of the artwork’s poetic logic. Time, in this case, is not simply an external threat. It is the work’s language.
That remains a valid and powerful artistic choice. Some artworks are meant to disappear. Others may be meant to endure. Both possibilities should remain in the hands of the artist.
This exploration does not seek to erase impermanence. Rather, it opens another path. When an artist wants a digital work to remain present across decades — to continue evolving, responding, and living in the world over time — longevity too can become part of the artistic vision.
A First Artistic Medium
To begin exploring this idea, we started experimenting with modular visual surfaces — luminous forms able to sense aspects of the environment and respond to them.
Individually, they can host a single artwork. Together, they can form larger compositions, installations, or spatial environments. In this sense, the artwork is no longer confined to a frame in the traditional way. It can inhabit a wall, a corner, a room, even an architectural gesture.
What matters here is not only the technology, but the artistic possibility it opens. An artist can imagine a work unfolding across multiple surfaces, shifting through visual states, responding to environmental changes, moving through subtle narrative transitions, or acknowledging the presence of those who encounter it.
The intention is not to replace existing forms of art. It is to open another language: one in which digital art can become more spatial, more temporal, and more quietly alive.
What Kind of Art Could This Become?
This leads to a simple but important question: what kind of art could emerge from such a medium?
It would not be defined by a single style. It would not belong to one aesthetic. What defines it is not only how it looks at first glance, but how it behaves over time. Instead of remaining fixed, a work might shift gently with daylight in a room, breathe with ambient sound, move through emotional or narrative states, or subtly respond when someone approaches.
These changes need not be dramatic. In fact, the most interesting ones may be the least obvious — the kind of transformations that are felt before they are consciously noticed.
The ambition is not to make digital art louder. It is to make it more present. A painting made of light. A sculpture made of time. A work that shares space with us not as a screen demanding attention, but as a living composition unfolding slowly, almost like weather, almost like memory.
The Artist’s Studio
To make this possible, we created an early prototype system through which artists can begin transforming static works into living artworks. The intention is not to burden the artist with technical complexity, but to create a process that feels open, intuitive, and generative.
An artist can upload different states of a work, shape how it evolves over time, experiment with environmental signals, and preview how the piece behaves in space.
This matters because a new medium only becomes meaningful when artists can actually inhabit it. The goal is not to ask every creator to become an engineer. It is to offer artists a way of composing with duration, presence, and response, much as earlier artists learned to compose with pigment, lens, montage, or code.
If photography expanded the possibilities of painting rather than ending them, perhaps a living medium can expand the possibilities of digital art in a similar way.
This medium is still taking shape, and part of its meaning will come from the people who choose to explore it.
Artists, hackers, and collaborators are invited to help shape what this language can become.
Interaction
Interaction, in this context, should not be misunderstood as novelty or gimmick. This exploration is not interested in interactivity for its own sake. What matters is the possibility that an artwork might become sensitive to the conditions around it and, through that sensitivity, become more alive.
A work might react when someone approaches, perhaps with the smallest sign of acknowledgement — a blink, a shift, a pause. It might move through dawn, day, dusk, and night, not as a loop, but as a rhythm. It might change with the seasons, with light, with weather, with the sound of a room. It might even pass through narrative states, like a seed becoming plant, then flower, or emotional tones moving from calm to curiosity to excitement.
What matters is that these transitions feel organic rather than mechanical. The work should not feel like it is repeating a trick. It should feel as though it is inhabiting time.
White Mirror
So much of the cultural imagination around technology is shaped by anxiety. We are used to futures in which technology distances us from ourselves, from one another, and from the subtle things that make life meaningful. CODAME has often tried to hold space for another direction — a White Mirror direction — one in which technology can deepen our relationship with creativity, beauty, and human expression instead of flattening it.
This exploration belongs to that vision. It imagines a future in which artists retain ownership of their work, where artworks do not simply disappear because the supporting systems fail, and where technology expands artistic language rather than replacing it.
The image is simple, but it stays with us: a painting that breathes, a sculpture that notices you, art that lives with us not as an interruption, but as a companion.
From Hackathon to the World
Like many meaningful things, this did not begin as a finished system. It began as a spark. During the Creative Hackathon, in Milan and online across different geographies, artists, technologists, designers, and curious minds came together not just to build projects, but to prototype sensibilities, test ways of thinking, and imagine what kinds of cultural forms might become possible in the years ahead.
What emerged from that atmosphere feels less like a collection of finished works and more like a constellation of beginnings — ideas, gestures, and artistic signals that deserve time to keep unfolding.
In that spirit, CODAME has chosen to use ARTEX, as a current working title, as a shared vessel for the continuation of selected hackathon projects, wherever that feels meaningful and wherever artists wish to participate.
It is an invitation to keep building together — to continue hacking, co-hacking, and evolving these works toward Milano Design Week, future CODAME moments, and new encounters around the world.
Through this shared path, some of these works may continue evolving toward Milano Design Week, future CODAME moments, and cultural encounters in other cities around the world.
The hackathon was not the end of the work.
Perhaps that is also the deeper invitation inside this exploration:
to artists, hackers, technologists, and curious humans who want to help imagine what living digital art could become.
It was where another chapter began.
Through ARTEX, we continue to hack, co-hack, and imagine that future together.
Looking Toward 2036
When we speak about 2036, we are not trying to predict the future with precision. We are trying to cultivate a horizon. The future does not arrive all at once; it emerges through what we create together, through the values we embed in our tools, through the kinds of experiences we choose to design, and through the forms of culture we decide are worth carrying forward.
Looking toward 2036, this exploration invites us to imagine a world in which artworks evolve quietly in homes and public spaces, where artists compose living works rather than static images, where artworks in different cities influence one another across distance, and where collectors become not only owners, but caretakers of living cultural systems.
These are not fixed outcomes, nor a closed roadmap. They are signals. Hints. Openings. They suggest where a new artistic medium might lead if nurtured with care, imagination, and time.
And perhaps, underneath all of this, the same simple question remains:
What if art did not simply hang on the wall, but lived with us?