Collecting digital art raises some familiar questions around artistic significance, provenance, and originality, but it also introduces new responsibilities. Software can become obsolete, hardware can fail, and works designed to evolve over time may require an entirely different approach to stewardship. Authentication can take familiar forms, such as certificates and editions, alongside newer systems including blockchain-based provenance; preservation, meanwhile, requires planning well beyond the point of purchase.

Episode 2 of Decoding Art in the Digital Era, ‘Collecting the New’, looks beyond the boom and bust of NFTs to examine a maturing field. From authentication and provenance to conservation, migration, and long-term maintenance, the episode shows that acquiring digital art can be the beginning of an ongoing relationship with a work. It also considers a new generation of digitally fluent buyers entering the art world at a moment when the history and canon of digital art are still being written.

Featuring Basma Al Sulaiman, Michael Spalter, Kim and Lito Camacho, Steven Sacks, Tony Lyu, Audrey Ou, Eli Scheinman, Noah Horowitz, Matthew Newton, and Carola Weise, the episode brings together collectors, dealers, and art-world voices to consider what it means not simply to acquire digital art, but to care for it over time.