COLLECTOR’S CHOICE - Recent Publications on Digital and Generative Art
“An education is not something you “get”, it’s something you take. It’s something you make” – Ryan Holiday (Wisdom Takes Work)
Collecting books has long been an integral part of understanding and researching art. In the context of generative and digital art, books serve not only as reference materials but also as essential documents of cultural and artistic history. They often contain essays, archival images, artist interviews, and curatorial perspectives that are not available elsewhere.
While digital art exists in intangible formats or on screens, books offer a lasting and tangible way to access the field. They can contextualize movements, show an artist’s development, or preserve exhibitions that might otherwise be lost in the rapid digital world. This has been especially important in media art, where many early works, from 1960s computer experiments to 1990s net art, were short-lived or tied to outdated technologies. Books remain the most reliable records of these practices.
Books offer knowledge that is often difficult to access through digital platforms alone. They bring together research, reflection, and context that can help people better understand generative and digital art, while also supporting critical thinking and historical awareness. Certain publications, especially limited editions, artist books, or exhibition catalogues, can also hold value as collectable objects. Their design, printing, or rarity can make them important cultural artifacts in their own right.
Color: 1995 – 2025 by Jeff Davis
In the following, we highlight a few recently published books that we consider important contributions to the field. One of them is Color: 1995–2025 by Jeff Davis, a beautifully curated and designed volume published alongside the retrospective exhibition at Artverse in Paris. The book offers an overview of Davis’s practice over the past thirty years, from traditional painting and printmaking to digital and algorithmic works, with a focus on his exploration of color theory.
Another important publication is Ecologies of Becoming by Sougwen Chung, a richly illustrated monograph published by Anteism that showcases a wide range of Chung’s interdisciplinary work, including drawing, performance, and digital pieces. The book focuses on themes like co-creation, hybridity, and the role of machines in the creative process, and offers a clear look into Chung’s approach to art.
Ecologies of Becoming by Sougwen Chung
Technelegy by Sasha Stiles explores how language, authorship, and creativity are changing in the age of AI. First published in 2021 and now reissued in paperback with new content, the book features poems co-written with Stiles’s AI-powered alter ego. As one of the first works of its kind, it reflects on what it means to write and to be human in a time shaped by machines.
TECHNELEGY by Sasha Stiles
Ropa sucia (The Wash) is a limited edition artist book by Ana María Caballero @CaballeroAnaMa, created in collaboration with S/W Ediciones and ARRATOS. Each copy includes twelve poems printed on handmade paper crafted from the artist’s old bedsheets. Readers can arrange the poems, turning the reading experience into a form of co-creation. The work explores themes of domesticity, memory, and language, using both analog and digital forms.
The Xenotext: Book 2 by @christianbok continues his ambitious project to create “living poetry” by encoding a poem into the DNA of a bacterium. After years of work, Bök succeeded in inscribing a poetic sequence into a resilient microorganism, presenting poetry as something that could survive beyond human existence. This second volume reflects on the scientific and philosophical ideas behind the project.
Ropa sucia (The Wash) by Ana María Caballero
These publications demonstrate the diversity of book-making in the context of digital art. While we’ve focused here on a few recent volumes, there are many other remarkable publications, both past and present. We encourage readers and collectors to collect books as a way to experience and understand today’s artistic practices.
The Xenotext: Book 2 by Christian Bök