For its fourth edition, the Digital Sector opens a new chapter under the curatorship of Marco De Mutiis, Digital Curator at Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland.
It brings together 12 contemporary art galleries, curatorial platforms and special projects exploring the transformations of the photographic image brought about by digital technologies.


A word from the curator
“If photography has shaped the way we look at, interpret and construct the world for the past two hundred years, it is equally true that this photographic vision has continually evolved in step with technological change. After more than three decades of digital imagery entering the photographic medium, we no longer ‘see’ through the prism of optics alone. Our gaze is informed by the layers of Photoshop as much as by the aesthetics of social media, facial-recognition algorithms and internet memes. We interpret reality through the culture of selfies and smartphones, digital graphic design and photorealistic artificial intelligence, screenshots and the economy of the ‘like’.

Our vision is augmented, extended and challenged by machines; photographic images have become sites of collaboration and conflict between humans and non-humans. Many contemporary photographers and artists explore the photographic image and its transformations under digital and networked conditions, revealing in turn how these conditions shape our perception and our understanding of authorship and mediation. Their practices question and expand the field of photography, foregrounding the medium’s experimental potential by reinventing formats, materials and techniques that push the image into uncharted territory.

Building on the essential work of Nina Roehrs, whose curatorial vision has established the Digital Sector over the past three years as a space for artistic exploration and experimentation, the sector now opens a new chapter. My approach seeks to deepen the dialogue between the specificity of the digital and photography’s long history—highlighting both continuities and ruptures, and making space for practices that challenge established aesthetic conventions while honouring the medium’s restless, transformative spirit.

In short, these works are experimental yet rooted in the photographic: they push the boundaries of the medium while remaining open to exchanges with its history, its materiality and its enduring capacity to renew the way we see. As part of the Bicentenary of Photography, the Digital Sector brings its legacy and its future into view at the same time—from the origins of the medium and a technique that revolutionised vision to the emerging forms that will shape the way we look at the world over the next two hundred years.”