In the 2000s, the future felt fresh. The web was rapidly becoming mainstream, affecting how a whole generation congregated, dreamed, and created. Artworks emerged that addressed social and political shifts by engaging with this new informational milieu. Three leading digital artists with exhibitions in Europe this summer, Cao Fei, Jon Rafman, and Oliver Laric, all got their breakthroughs in this period, and their shows shine a light on that era while putting our own moment of extreme change into perspective. As Cao points out via email, a younger generation born after the millennium now gushes over what are seen as early-2000s retro cultures: ‘Y2K aesthetics, low-resolution imagery, imperfection, and a certain rawness.’ Yet, the artist asks, ‘how can audiences in 2026 enter a virtual space from 2007 without feeling that they are merely visiting an antique?’

It is a key issue that artists, curators, and institutions must confront when considering how to present work using yesterday’s ‘cutting-edge’ technology, which, by its nature perhaps, is fast outmoded. To avoid getting trapped in archival limbo, should work be adapted for the fresh viewing habits of a new audience, and if so, how can digital culture’s history be honored?

Laric recalls how his very first exhibition, the group show ‘Character Reference’ at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in New York in 2007, came about after the curator Caitlin Jones saw his work 787 Cliparts (2006) online. ‘It was the first time I experienced a video going viral,’ he tells me. Using stock illustrations from clipart CDs from the early 1990s onwards, the work presents a dizzying cast of characters who shape-shift from knights to footballers to yogis to musicians and on and on, in a rapid-fire succession of cut-and-paste stock identities. For his current show ‘Save For Later’ at DOCK 20 in Lustenau, Austria, Laric has presented 787 Cliparts alongside three new videos. The differences between the artist’s breakthrough exhibition and the Lustenau show are tangible even at the most basic level. Here his works, built from material left over from the original project, are shown on vertical screens, and with their aspect ratios (the images’ widths and heights) adjusted to match how moving-image work has been consumed in recent years. Installed as a tight sequence and accompanied by stacks of loose posters, they compose a larger new work that, like all of the artist’s output, makes no claims to longevity: it will exist only for the show’s duration.

Cao’s breakout work was immersed in the virtual world Second Life, a technological game changer in the 2000s, though its user numbers dropped off through the 2010s. It became the basis for her work RMB City (2007–2011), in which she constructed, maintained, and inhabited a virtual metropolis. RMB City remained open – and thus habitable for visitors – for the duration of the project, mirroring the urban development of China, while offering a freer virtual space in which the artist could circumvent the country’s political censorship at the time. More broadly, like Laric, Cao tapped into the emerging culture of playing with identity online via avatars, one that would flourish against a backdrop of global economic crisis. Stephanie Seidel, the co-curator of Cao’s survey exhibition ‘Testimonies to the Near Future’ at Kunstmuseum Basel, observes that ‘the works themselves have not changed, but history has caught up with them, allowing us to see them simultaneously as speculative propositions and historical testimony.’

Cao explains that the experience of designing and living inside a virtual world influenced how she now thinks about physical exhibition spaces. While the artist’s show ‘Dash’ at Fondazione Prada in Milan debuts a new multimedia project, her concurrent survey in Basel looks back to seminal moments in her career and spans three decades of output. In Basel, Cao decided to display her older digital work in a way that can speak to our current imagination, by transforming the museum’s four floors into a city, a series of connected immersive installations that conjure the life of a metropolis from its factories to its street culture. A fuller picture of RMB City is built in a section resembling, appropriately enough, a real estate office. It contains an offline version of Second Life on view on a desktop computer, and video projections on the walls, including an interview with Cao’s avatar, China Tracy. ‘The installation elements must function as part of the work’s context: they are not decorative, but rather serve as annotations, guides, and even sources of insight,’ she says.

A similar strategy has been deployed by Jon Rafman, whose first comprehensive survey in Germany, ‘Main Stream Media’, is at K21 in Düsseldorf. The Canadian artist initially garnered attention with Nine Eyes of Google Street View (2008–), a collection of oddball moments caught by Google Street View car cameras. He then established a reputation for exploring darker online weirdness and the subcultures that thrive via sites like 4chan, and for cerebral animations that reflect on the alienating effects of life on the web. Rafman, working with his frequent collaborator Liam Denhamer of the design studio Juvenilia, adapted every preexisting work for display in K21’s galleries, translating his sketches into printed wallpapers, curtains, carpets, props, and colored lighting. ‘The entire exhibition is his artwork,’ explains Karen Archey, the exhibition’s co-curator with Doris Krystof. ‘[He] wants to recreate the psychological conditions of the Internet within meatspace.’ As such, it looks back to a time before smartphones when the distinction between online and physical space could be more clearly defined.

‘Modernism has a way of tricking us into thinking that the only relevant period of time is the present,’ says Archey. Using exhibition architecture to let visitors physically enter works that might otherwise seem technologically obsolete can further understanding of their broader significance. It also resonates with how museums ‘must compete with the immersivity of our media environment,’ she offers.

Cao suggests that the issue is perhaps less that the technology becomes outdated, than that our understanding of it should be more fluid. ‘Many viewers may not realize that artists have long been searching, challenging, questioning, and creating within these evolving technological landscapes,’ she says. ‘The transition between old and new technologies is not a rupture, but a continuum.’