Learning in Public
Brian Droitcour introduces an initiative for criticism and education
The art world often meets new technologies—immersive experiences, NFTs, AI—less with curiosity than with alarm. Cultural authorities rush to draw boundaries. They tell us why these things aren’t real art, why they threaten existing values, why they should be ignored. In doing so, they overlook the popular fascination these technologies inspire and the ways they might expand our understanding of what art can be.
Art history has always preferred the safety of hindsight. It waits for the present to harden before daring to interpret it. But digital culture won’t wait. Its rhythms outpace biennials, journals, and syllabi. Some suggest we should let the academy decide which artists of the digital age will endure—but with higher education itself under siege, that deferral feels especially uncertain.
We’ve seen what happens when institutions fall behind. Biennials used to be laboratories for the contemporary. Now they tend to be mausoleums, full of dead artists and tired approaches. Into that vacuum stepped the market. NFTs, for a brief moment, built an art world without institutions—a space where artists working with code and software found visibility and support. Yet that sphere, too, was driven by spectacle and speed, offering little room for reflection or history.
Marshall McLuhan once described how he overcame his youthful distrust of technology, realizing that art’s task is not to moralize about change but to make sense of it. Art, he said, is “the playback of ordinary experience—from trash to treasures.” Outland takes up that spirit: to approach new technologies not as threats or novelties, but as conditions for learning, creativity, and community.
Outland launched in 2021 as a pioneering startup dedicated to commissioning and selling digital editions by leading contemporary artists. In its first year, Outland released five NFT collections that helped define what a fine-art approach to blockchain-based art market could look like.
Yet as the NFT market contracted in 2022, the niche Outland was carving out—digital artworks situated within the broader contexts of contemporary art and institutional practice—proved too narrow to sustain a commercial model. In June 2024, the founders decided to suspend operations.
Now, Outland is returning in a new form: as a nonprofit organization devoted to publishing and education in the field of art and technology.
In Outland’s first chapter, I edited its online magazine, which cultivated critical discourse around emerging art practices and the communities that shape them. That work complemented the startup’s curatorial activities by providing context for collectors, curators, and anyone interested in the evolving field of digital culture. In our new phase, publishing and dialogue are no longer auxiliary—they are the heart of what we do.
In its first years, Outland was one of several small organizations striving to connect critical and conceptual digital art with both online communities and art institutions. I often thought that these efforts would have been stronger—and more sustainable—if we could have worked together instead of competing in a nascent field. The spirit of collaboration animates the new Outland. I’m aiming to partner widely—with digital-native organizations, brick-and-mortar institutions, and academic programs—to realize projects that bridge art and technology through public conversation.
Several such collaborations are already underway. In partnership with the MA program in Design Research, Writing, and Criticism at the School of Visual Arts, Outland is organizing a workshop to explore machine learning applications as both writing tools and objects of critical inquiry. That program will kick off with a public event on November 20. With Amant, an exhibition and residency space in Brooklyn, we’re hosting “Avatar Studies,” an afternoon of talks about game engines and motion capture as artistic mediums. Other digital publishing initiatives—including an interactive exhibition and an online catalogue—will be announced soon.
Meanwhile, Outland will continue to publish independent criticism here on Substack, using the newsletter as a flexible platform to test ideas in public, as we work on building a new website that hosts our archive and spotlights new projects and partnerships. This Substack will present monthly columns that reflect the breadth of our interests and the values that guide our work. Artist and writer Al Warburton will explore the concept of worldbuilding from different vantage points—as top-down systems of control and the bottom-up creative labor that powers the games industry—through topics like digital nature and virtual sex. Sarah Hromack, a seasoned digital strategist for art institutions and the author of the indispensable newsletter Soft Labor, will write about the encounters between institutions and new media, and the shifting meanings of digital work. I’ll be writing a column of my own about how artists have responded to the shift from Web 2.0 and web3, from social media platforms to decentralized protocols, and how the values associated with these eras of the internet are expressed in digital art.
We’re pursuing this project at a time when writing and criticism are often overlooked—when short-form video seems to matter more than sustained thought. But we believe criticism still plays a vital role, especially when it centers narratives and ideas that remain outside the mainstream. When the art world eventually turns its attention to the art that engages with what matters now—as it inevitably will—we want Outland to stand as a record of the present: a resource for understanding how artists and thinkers made sense of technological change as it unfolded.
If the institutional art world has grown insular by clinging to familiar hierarchies, we’re interested in something different: openness, humility, and a willingness to learn from the communities that are actually shaping digital culture. Our goal is to build a critical institution—not just one that produces criticism, but one that embodies the kind of institution we wish were more common: porous, experimental, and responsive to the world it studies.
As Outland’s next chapter unfolds, we’re eager to collaborate with partners who share this vision—those who believe that art, technology, and critical reflection belong in the same conversation. If you have an idea for a project or collaboration, I’d love to hear from you.
Brian Droitcour is an art critic and the director of Outland.