Exploring the future of digital creativity: Kate Vass on art, tech, an

Kate Vass, art-tech visionary and founder of Zurich's Kate Vass Galerie, has dedicated her career to elevating digital art and supporting emerging talents. Her gallery was one of the world’s first spaces devoted entirely to showcasing digital creativity.

In our conversation, which took place during InkPoster’s participation at Digital Art Mile, Kate Vass reflects on her experience working at the forefront of digital art, discusses the trends redefining the industry, and explains why InkPoster is such an essential project for making art more accessible and relevant today.

Searching for Kandinskys and Warhols of our times

Art has always been part of my life – not just visual art, but music, theatre, architecture, and performance. Later, through my engagement with finance, crypto, and DeFi, I started questioning the traditional frameworks that govern value, ownership, and systems of trust. That’s when I started to see that this technology could somehow reflect what is going on in the art world.

As a collector, I have looked at thousands of artworks while collaborating with different galleries and collectors. That's when I started to question myself, who are the Kandinskys and Warhols of our times? And that's when I got captivated.

At first, I think it was more like a passion to find the answers – to discover who reflects on our times. Then it became a mission: to represent artists working with AI, machine learning, code, algorithmic art, or other cutting-edge technologies.

At some point, opening up my own gallery was about not repeating the same models in all senses, but finding new types of relationships that you can build with artists. A new type of art that you can actually show, a new type of relationship – how you can engage with the community, and a new generation of collectors. I think that's where art and tech played a vital role.

Value of digital art

What’s the core of a creative tool if it's natively digital? How can I, as a collector, engage with this art on a different level, not just by transferring the file through Dropbox or USB, or by playing the videotape in the recorder?

With blockchain, we found many answers – at least for me as a gallerist. You could prove provenance, prove the digital scarcity of a file, and engage with a community in a very fast way.

It captivated me because, from what I've seen in traditional finance and other sectors, it felt like the traditional models, whatever sector we are talking about, would no longer work as well as they used to work. We have to look into the future. And the future is technology and innovation.

From screen to gallery wall

I think the physical presentation of digital works in analog spaces is very important. When we are talking about something new – whether it's a technology or anything that’s emerging – if people don't know it, they tend to fear what's coming. So in order to educate and to build trust, you have to be there, you have to be open, and you have to meet and greet. You have to be present for the audience so that they can build the trust together with you.

The dialogue, the real conversation tête-à-tête, is very important. Even though it's natively digital work, it doesn't have to be presented just purely digital. It can be performance. It can be interactive work. It can be an animation. It can be on a screen. It can be presented as a print. It can be on a canvas. It depends on the whole idea and the concept of the work. It can also be just light and the presence of the moment, and the perception of how you see this work in this particular moment.

Turning emerging talents into established artists

Since I was the only one who was truly interested in this space from the beginning, I had to find all the artists, approach them, and collect them. First of all, you have to support the artist that you believe in. That's an important part of a journey.

For me, every collaboration I've made, every exhibition I curated, has been very important, and it's like a time capsule. I think it's also a milestone for many artists, because we gave birth to many emerging artists, and now they're established artists.

How the pandemic changed everything

Digital art has a huge history. It wasn’t born yesterday. For me, it is out of the question that it is already recognized. It is a part of our culture as contemporary art, and it has to be recognized by even more people.

But, I think there is a moment, since 2021, that accelerated the acceptance of digital art due to the pandemic and lockdown, when people were forced to look and collect via online tools. Probably that was the milestone when the whole system shifted.

I think that is when you could actually feel that you don't need a physical space anymore to sell and to show digital art, because the pandemic gave us a huge boost in the online space, and we sold all the digital works, but we didn't have any access to the physical ones.

Trends in digital art and collecting

Contemporary art is being reshaped by systems thinking. Artists aren’t just making objects – they’re interrogating infrastructures: identity, algorithms, power, networks. There’s a shift from material to immaterial, from form to code, from solo to collective. This isn’t about aesthetics alone – it’s about agency and context.

The contemporary art that I live in – in Web3 – I think, we can see here a big diversity and a blend of AI, on-chain, aesthetics and data together, and ethics as well. At the same time, we also see environmental impacts and community engagement when we talk about the Web3 culture. What I see as the trend for the future is not only a style. I think it's the whole system shift, and also the shift of how we engage with art and how we collect art. That's the biggest trend for me.

I think we will see traditional art galleries evolve, and of course, we have already seen new ecosystems emerging – not only galleries – and new ways of approaching digital art collecting.

This is the biggest shift. And it's not going to be just about collecting a particular work as an individual. I think it's also, since art becomes programmable, the collecting becomes like a community-driven sort of performance. Maybe we will see digital art collecting also shift toward something more like co-authoring art as well.

For sure, something revolutionary can still be created. I think true artists, the geniuses, always feel time in a different sense from the general audience. I think they feel things, and they serve as a fortune teller in a certain way. They tend to engage with the most interesting tools and the most innovative technologies.

Nowadays, we talk a lot about quantum computing, and for me, the most interesting artworks lie in this field. There are a lot of talks about artificial intelligence, but it's general artificial intelligence. It's not super intelligence. So when we reach the next step, we might see very interesting conceptual works as well as artists working with quantum computing.

Debunking the myth about digital art

I think the biggest misconception is still that digital art is somehow easier, that it is generated, not created. I respond to that by saying that every medium, from oil to photography, faced the same skepticism at some point. And that everybody sees that AI is not an artist – it's just a brush, it's a lens, it's a mirror, but it's not a creator. That, I think, is the biggest misconception. And we still have to believe that the artist is a central figure as a creator, and not the AI. AI is just a tool.

Future of the digital art community

I definitely feel like we need more tech infrastructure to make this community work better. What I mean by “better” is probably that we have to look back on what we started in 2017- 2018, and how we entered this art-and-tech space when we were encouraging people to pay royalties. We were all for the democratization of art, connecting artist and collector, trying to eliminate all the intermediaries like myself, the middleman and middlewoman.

However, I think the traditional art market model works, in the sense that we do need all the components for the ecosystem to function. We need art critics, we need curators, we need galleries. We need institutions. We need our collectors. And, of course, we need artists.

But at the same time, I wish to see that technology is still used to elevate and add value to the space. Over time, many platforms have stopped giving royalties for secondary market sales. I find it very sad, because that was one of the key drivers and motivations for me – surprisingly, as a gallerist – to see these incentives paid to the artist. I think it's very important to keep this financial freedom to the artists, so they can actually create more.

And for the future, my wishful thinking is that I see more interesting and innovative projects, maybe better presentations of artworks, because we need better screens. We need better – maybe not screens per se – but some sort of visualization that we can use to present natively digital art that speaks for the audience, looks good, and feels good. That is very important.

Digital art newcomers – where to start

I suggest starting by looking and probably self-educating yourself. I mean, look at the works, or visit the exhibitions by Refik Anadol, Sougwen Chung, Anna Ridler, and Osinachi.

To get familiar with the perception of art, I would recommend looking into the work of Robert Irwin, who is actually a contemporary artist, but he revolutionized the art world in a big way, and I think he’s a very early predecessor for digital art.

We also have many galleries that you can visit, or go to the platforms like Objkt, Feral File, and SuperRare. The art is affordable, and you can just browse around and learn.

Since I've been working with collectors for many years, I feel it's a very right moment to document this journey, and also to encourage more collectors, newcomers, and the new generation to start collecting digital art. That's why I'm offering my first book, Collecting Art On-chain, which is coming out very soon. It's a landmark publication dedicated to the collectors and builders who shaped Web3 culture.

About InkPoster

InkPoster collapses distance. It’s not just a display - it’s a gallery without walls. A quiet revolution in accessibility. It's a very important platform that will allow people to engage, collect, learn, feel, and look at art from a different perspective. InkPoster makes collecting intuitive, decentralized, and emotional.

I think it's a really beautiful project. For me, InkPoster represents the next chapter of distribution and ownership. It brings contemporary culture into living rooms, bedrooms, and airports. Art as presence, not prestige. That’s a future I want to build.