The Best Digital Art of 2025, According to Curators, Artists, and Critics

Although artists have been in dialogue with web-based livestreaming since the early net art years, surprisingly few have engaged with the distinctly dissonant, recursive, and deeply weird visual and cultural landscape of streamer culture as we know it in the 2020s. American Artist takes this head-on with Crash Out (2025), a work that weaves together the (para)social power dynamics and cinematographic hallmarks of streamer culture so deftly that, upon first encounter, I wasn’t sure if it was fiction, documentary, or some blurry space in between. Of all the work I’ve seen this year, Crash Out has left the most enduring mark—deeply “of its time,” and the one I keep coming back to. —Cass Fino-Radin, Vice President of Art & Technology at Canyon

This summer, a few friends and I drove up to Newburgh for the opening of Zarina’s solo exhibition at Visit. Her video work REAL FEELINGS (2025) was the centerpiece of the show, complemented by a therapist’s-office-style black leather lounge chair inscribed with the words “COLLAPSE IS THE OPENING.” Over the course of 32 minutes, Real Feelings oscillates between self-help TikTok compilations and black-and-white, warping AI-generated videos overlaid with a soft, feminine voice offering life advice. In all of her work, Zarina’s music background shines through, with found clips cut and compiled into a satisfying, syncopated rhythm. Watching the piece, I found myself dipping in and out of two modes: critiquing this genre of content and genuinely craving the life-changing advice it promises to provide. Zarina works in a way that’s conscious of this paradox. She understands the complexity of online consumption inside and out. —Maya Man, an artist focused on contemporary identity culture on the internet

I met Korean-born web artist Yehwan Song at Columbia University’s MFA Open Studio in New York this fall. Surrounded by her work at Pioneer Works, user-friendly interfaces—often thought to define how we experience the internet—become just another conceptual framework. Beyond that framework lie infinite possibilities and collisions, as seen in her non-generic web interfaces and performance-based interactions. This year, she has already drawn attention with shows at Pioneer Works and Tate Britain. What’s next? —Hayoung Chung, Curator of Space ZeroOne

A dozen years ago—though I can no longer remember in what context—Marina Zurkow described herself as using humor amid general ecological indifference. Her exhibition “Parting Worlds,” alongside the new Hyundai Commission The River Is a Circle, both on view at the Whitney this year, felt poignant in that regard. The dismantling of the Environmental Protection Agency and other regulatory efforts were blown away by other political acts, perhaps like the plastic bag drifting above the sinkhole in the 2012 work Mesocosm (Wink, TX). It’s dark yet funny, and it made me feel wistful and appreciative of any small environmental effort. At least we tried to keep alive a spirit of generosity beyond consumerism’s immediate gratification. —Charlotte Kent, Associate Professor of Visual Culture at Montclair State University

Sarah Friend’s Prompt Baby (2025) exposes the libidinal economy beneath much of the so-called playful experimentation with AI. Her work deftly negotiates the interplay of desire, authorship, and economic power. The piece is unsettling, revealing how parasocial demand and market entitlement press upon the artist’s body as data, avatar, and negotiable surface. For her presentation in the group exhibition “to ignite our skin” at SculptureCenter, Friend showed images of her ghostly digital avatar—created in her likeness—on cell phones. The images were generated through a collaborative yet fraught process in which collectors purchase an NFT granting them the right to submit a prompt describing an action for the avatar to perform. Unsurprisingly, these prompts ranged from playful and amateurish to deranged and explicit.—Eileen Isagon Skyers, writer, curator, and artist with a decade of experience in media art

Entering Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley’s THE DELUSION (2025) at the Serpentine Galleries in London immediately pulls you into a satirical gaming environment set within a postapocalyptic, horror-inflected speculative future, where unease, control, and fractured social connection shape how you move through the space. The physical exhibition opens with printed terms and conditions on the wall, alongside a zine that functions like a rulebook, making it clear from the outset that participation is the premise and play shapes engagement. I’m drawn to world-building that borrows from gaming, and this show leans fully into that, using absurdity to explore how humans interact with technology and with each other without flattening those questions into something heavy-handed. Moving through THE DELUSION feels like riding a strange roller coaster that blends interactive media with real political and moral pressure, all structured through the intentional curatorial and production framing of Tamar Clarke-Brown and the Serpentine Technologies team. —Danielle Paterson, art tech curator, art adviser, and researcher

This ambitious interactive installation activated the gallery’s window on the High Line in a wholly unique way, creating a shared experience around permanence and loss. I love how the work folds human coordination into the act of viewing, making the generative output feel both personal and interpersonal. —Kelani Nichole, technologist and founder of TRANSFER new media art gallery and data co-op

This work, from 2023 but on view this year, stayed with me precisely because of its restraint. The work reconstructs anti-immigration riots in Rotterdam that have largely slipped out of collective memory, even among those directly affected. Using sparse archival material and carefully staged reenactments, Caner avoids dramatizing or sensationalizing the violence, instead rebuilding a narrative that has been structurally forgotten. In an era of hyper-polemical digital discourse, this gentleness doesn’t dilute the work; it sharpens it.—Cem A., artist with a background in anthropology

PET features some of my favorite thinkers—Bogna Konior and Maya Kronic—among an avatar cast of AI-generated NSFW human-animal hybrids. Drawing on male desire, the characters evoke digital pets, while also reflecting our relationship to latent space.—Günseli Yalcinkaya, writer, researcher, and internet folklorist

Last, but not least, my pick: I caught “How to Get to Zero” at Pioneer Works just before it closed, and I’m glad I did. The exhibition brings together works that Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne have made over the past decade, both as collaborators and solo practitioners. On view are their many artistic inventions for addressing the climate crisis, using art to encourage audiences to participate in direct action. Given the time I’ve spent studying and reporting on online marketplaces, I was particularly drawn to Offset (2023–25), an online carbon-credit market in which CO₂ capture is represented not by trees planted but by acts of industrial sabotage.