Digitisation is a one-way street, but all the cars are coming the other way. Now everyone wants bodies, physicality, a Nils Frahm soundtrack where I can hear the keys click on the piano and the player taking a sharp inhale before the crescendo because now's really the time to concentrate. The same is true for us the digital art fiends. We spent the last five years grabbing at anything we could, printing in 8-bit and AI-generated infinities the cryptopunks, the lackadaisical monkeys, the inebriated photographs of the complimentary pale ales available en mass at the openings where we laughed and cheered at television screens. We rode the flood right up to the high water mark on the gallery walls. Digital art soared, buoyant. It's still riding the waves. But there's a shift in the air, and you can see it in the works themselves.

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Digital art is necessarily different from a virtual rendering of something that's been painted. Anything can be made 2-D, sucked into the computer screen Tron-style and sat on the infinite gallery floor known as the internet or the Instagram feed. But you can't run the process in reverse, however much you might want to. Try @mregfx's inflating heads for instance. It's a trend I've seen everywhere, let's call it the 'jellification' of everyday objects: a short looping gif where the as-close-to-life-as-possible rendering of something starts to spontaneously flop around and morph and stretch out of shape in ways that physical sculpture can only imitate in science fiction. How about @marblemaniki's collapsing cubes? Here a block of pretty solid-looking speckled marble is sliced up like cheese by some sharp imaginary contraption and the resulting dice spill down under the force of gravity. For the surreal images at play, this new work is almost a little too tangible. You get the feeling that the art is stretching toward real life from the other side of the screen.

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If there's one constant to the development of technology, it's that new tools always tend to exceed themselves. They have this ability, endowed with a sprinkling of human imagination, to reach into the future to articulate desires that aren't possible in the current understanding of reality. I for one, would be somewhat disquieted if my neighbour's head swelled up like a balloon with proper warning, but then perhaps I lack the eye of a digital sculptor. This generation of artists see things their own way, and their gaze is becoming steadily defined by a grasping toward something that doesn't ‘exist’. Nowhere is this more apparent than considering @madmaraca’s micro-architecture. Giving all the impression having been delicately crafted and pieced together one voxel at a time, her model apartment blocks, palaces, and lost cityscapes are teeming with fine details (enough to make Italo Calvino blush). It’s a highly intricate form of sculpture that lends itself more to world-building, the establishment of a grand atmosphere where the information present in a given piece far exceeds any one glimpse begging you to liken it to the actual experience of traversing an unknown city.

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That’s the trick, why the work is so archetypal for where digital art seems to be trending toward it wants to be real. It draws you in, down into the nooks and crannies, around corners, along the canals, out into broad piazzas and up through the positively microscopic windows all the while searching for inhabitants which aren’t there. There’s an underlying melancholia to this, because no matter how badly you want to creep inside these little worlds to go and find them, there’s a glass touchscreen in the way. One can only zoom in so far by pinching of the fingers, one’s nose can only press up so firmly against the display without inadvertently sending embarrassing messages to previous romantic attachments like it’s always been out to get you (because it has). Digital sculptures are always out of reach, and that means that the artists are always leaning toward the impossible when they create them.

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What to make of this unrequited desire for imaginary cities, materials and men? One is tempted to revert to the old adage that the internet has always been a mirror to culture, and that our moment is particularly concerned with manifesting ideals over concrete physicality working with the clay as it were. There is undoubtedly a political comment to be made, but this should be left to those inclined toward such matters the angry post-grads with their wine, John Cale themed dinner parties, and inimitable ardour for the works of David Foster Wallace. In the meantime, it would be more prudent to offer a trajectory for the art itself. If these sculptures want bodies, we should provide them. Give the ghosts a machine, 3-D print the jellified head, give me something I can see and smell and touch on the gallery floor, alongside the television set. The 2010s and all their discourse surrounding digital art centred on the internet’s dichotomy with an opposite physical reality this next decade should more heavily blur the lines. We’ve spent years outlining our wildest fantasies and most intimate desires online, perhaps now could be the time to act on them.

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