The Intersect: Art in Tech and Tech in Art - 52 Weeks at the Crossroads: A Year of Art & Technology

Greetings from Juergen

Hi there,

This marks the 52nd edition of The Intersect—a full year of exploring the connections between art and technology together. This week, I'm sharing stories about art that maps our world in unexpected ways. From an ancient Egyptian coffin that might contain the earliest visual representation of the Milky Way to a contemporary diagram that charts the fragmented terrain of today's art world. There's also Jakub Geltner's unnervingly organic surveillance camera sculptures and Greg Olijnyk's meticulous cardboard robots—both transforming familiar objects into something entirely new.

I've also included some lighter fare: a mosaic artist creating celebrity portraits from chocolate digestives, Samsung's expansion of its Art Store to more TV models, and a typography disaster on Pope Francis's tombstone that has designers everywhere cringing. After 52 weeks of curation, I've tried to maintain a balance with AI coverage—acknowledging its impact without letting it overshadow the broader conversation about creativity and technology.

Subscribe to "The Intersect: Art in Tech and Tech in Art" podcast to hear these stories in audio format—a perfect companion for your commute or creative sessions.

Data Driven Art

The Field of Contemporary Art: A Diagram

Art historian and educator Lane Relyea’s detailed essay, "The Field of Contemporary Art: A Diagram" (published on Triple Canopy), maps today’s art world into five intersecting subfields—market, exhibition, academia, community, and cultural activism—each operating with different definitions of what art is and does. It’s dense, but worth the read for anyone trying to understand why the “art world” often feels so disjointed.

The diagram itself isn’t just theory—it’s a mirror. It shows how we’re pulled in different directions depending on which subfield we orbit. And for those of us working across mediums or platforms, that tension isn’t just structural—it’s personal. Lately, I’ve been asking: are we navigating a field, or are we being shaped by it?

“If I once imagined that the fragmentation of the art field might relieve me of feeling painfully split between its conflicting values and hierarchies, the consolidation of its subfields has revealed the degree to which I'm the product of those conflicts.”

What would it mean to make art outside these coordinates—if that’s even possible anymore?

Art Narratives

Through Surreal Paintings, Shyama Golden Reincarnates a Mythic Narrative

Shyama Golden’s new show, Too Bad, So Sad, Maybe Next Birth, featured on Colossal, brings a surreal, mythic thread to life through oil on linen, each piece pulling from Sri Lankan folklore and personal memory. Golden builds a four-act visual narrative, with diptychs pairing broad scenes with intimate details—merging the personal with the cosmic. The article, written by Grace Ebert, highlights how the artist also collaborates with her husband, filmmaker Paul Trillo, to train an AI on her own visual language.

What I love here isn’t just the blue-faced trickster or the oranges bleeding across pavement—it’s the fact that Golden treats painting like storyboarding. Each canvas feels like a still from a myth retold by someone who’s lived it. There’s real continuity, not just in style but in emotional and symbolic development across the works.

“Many artists who are canonized are actually working in a style that they didn’t invent but that was part of a movement arising out of their time and location.”

Does sequential storytelling in visual art hit differently when technology—like AI—is also consuming the story?

Definitely Not AI

Ancient Egyptian Visual Depiction of the Milky Way Discovered

Recent reporting by Conny Waters at AncientPages.com highlights new research into ancient Egyptian depictions of the Milky Way. Dr. Or Graur, an astrophysicist at the University of Portsmouth, studied 125 images of the sky-goddess Nut across thousands of years and found something intriguing—a rare black, undulating curve on a 3,000-year-old coffin that closely mirrors the Milky Way’s Great Rift.

I always find it inspiring when old art gets a reinterpretation. Here’s a culture that wasn’t just observing the night sky—they were weaving it into religious belief, cosmology, and visual storytelling. The idea that Nut’s body, already symbolic of the sky, might also map an actual structure of our galaxy is a stunning example of ancient visual intelligence—both artistic and scientific.

“The texts, on their own, suggested one way to think about the link between Nut and the Milky Way. Analyzing her visual depictions on coffins and tomb murals added a new dimension that, quite literally, painted a different picture,” Graur said.

What other cosmic narratives have we overlooked in museums because we weren’t asking the right questions?

Design

Designers Do a Double Take at the Lettering on Pope Francis’s Tombstone

Typography critics lit up recently over Pope Francis’s tombstone, as reported by The New York Times. The inscription reads “FRANCISCVS,” but the spacing renders it more like “F R A NCISC VS.” It’s set in Times Roman, intended to reflect the Pope’s simplicity—yet the careless kerning has overshadowed that intent, frustrating anyone with even a basic design eye.

I trained in graphic design and have zero sympathy for the way this was executed. This isn’t about artistic interpretation or some obscure Latin engraving tradition—this is just bad spacing. And no, it’s not the fault of a dodgy typeface or algorithmic typesetting. Someone made deliberate choices here. They just weren’t good ones.

They might as well have used Comic Sans. It would’ve at least been honest about not caring.

How do we still get this wrong when the tools for doing it right are everywhere?

Interactive Art

Mosaic Artist Uses Biscuits to Make Famous Faces

London mosaic artist Ed Chapman was commissioned by McVitie’s to create portraits of David Bowie, Sir Trevor McDonald, and Dame Judi Dench using thousands of chocolate digestives. As reported by the BBC, Chapman used several varieties—white, dark, milk, and even the biscuit’s plain backside—to build a surprisingly nuanced color palette. The portraits, part of McVitie’s 100-year celebration of the chocolate digestive, will be on display on The Strand.

I’ll admit, I admire the patience it takes to turn a tea-time snack into a celebrity likeness. Chapman even mentioned refrigerating the biscuits to keep them easier to cut. But for me, biscuits belong in tea, not under varnish.

“I’ve protected them with several layers of varnish so... they should certainly last – they wouldn’t last in the direct sun though.”

Would you rather preserve your food as art, or eat it before it melts?

Sculpture

Jakub Geltner Bends Surveillance Cameras Into Curved Installations for Exhibition in Belgium

Jakub Geltner’s new installation, featured on designboom, transforms surveillance cameras into twisted, organic forms. Drawing from natural patterns like vines or root systems, the work pushes these digital sentinels into something almost creature-like—bent, clustered, and disturbingly alive.

These aren’t just sculptures—they feel like entities with intent. My immediate reaction? These cameras look like they're physically straining to catch you in their frame. You can feel their hunger to surveil, even though they’ve been rendered useless. And maybe that’s exactly the point—how deeply embedded these things have become in our environments and psyches.

I couldn’t help thinking: even deactivated and disarmed, these devices still carry an eerie presence. Their posture suggests a need to monitor, as if they’ve inherited a nervous system. It’s spooky. But it’s also a clever way to expose how surveillance has evolved into architecture—into our everyday spaces and expectations.

What would it take to really disarm a surveillance culture—bending the tools, or changing the gaze?

Cardboard Creations: Greg Olijnyk’s Amazing Robot Art

Melbourne-based artist Greg Olijnyk left behind his graphic design career in 2017, turning instead to cardboard as his primary medium—a shift explored in Design Swan’s feature on his highly detailed robot sculptures. His works, like “Ascension” and “The Assembly Line,” are entirely hand-cut, with no digital tools or automation involved. The results don’t look like cardboard at all—they feel like relics from a sci-fi world built by clockmakers.

What stands out to me is how the medium itself connects every piece. Cardboard gives Greg’s machines a quiet uniformity—almost like they’re all from the same dusty planet. There’s also something satisfying about turning something so disposable into something this deliberate and permanent.

"Cardboard naturally works well with simple curves, straight lines, and basic shapes," Greg explains. "When you see a bunch of my pieces together, they feel like they're connected, even though I didn't plan it that way."

I’m now eyeing the stack of Amazon boxes in my garage a little differently—should I start building robots or just keep recycling?

Creator Platforms and Tools

More Samsung TVs Can Look Like Beautiful Works of Art Now

Samsung is expanding its Art Store beyond The Frame TVs to include their 2025 Neo QLED line, according to coverage by CEPro. This means more of their high-end TVs will now support curated galleries from institutions like Art Basel and over 1,000 artists worldwide. Notably, their OLED line is still excluded, but the move clearly shows Samsung doubling down on the art-tech fusion they helped mainstream.

The tech here isn’t the headline. What matters is how Samsung is evolving the concept of a digital art gallery embedded into devices we already use. It’s not just screen-as-canvas anymore—it’s screen as portal. I’m interested in how this could shift the way we think about displaying and collecting work from living artists.

I don’t care how big the TV is. I care that Samsung is exploring how to make art more present in everyday life, without forcing it through the funnel of ownership. They’re shaping a new kind of casual curation.

Would you pay a subscription for rotating art on your wall, or does that feel like Netflix for paintings?

Art and Politics

I Sought My Soul, Considers a Contemporary Romanticism, a Newsublime in the World.

The group show I Sought My Soul, reviewed in FAD Magazine, draws from William Blake and sets up a bold conversation between mysticism, identity, and AI. Curated by Tyger Tyger and staged in the damaged-yet-sacred space of St. Elisabeth Kirche in Berlin, the exhibition offers a surprising softness—what the curators describe as a “new sublime.” Artists like Lu Yang, Anne Imhof, and Jacolby Satterwhite use digital avatars, dream logic, and spiritual yearning to sidestep the usual binaries of politics, gender, and belief.

I get why some younger artists feel cornered by the idea that art must carry a political stance. But I also think rejecting that impulse outright misses something. Autonomy doesn’t mean detachment. It’s not a refusal; it’s a choice. And sometimes, choosing to engage is the most autonomous act of all.

The exhibition highlights “a sense of fluidity amongst humanity, technology, artistic genres and personal orientations... emphasizing an open emotional framework.”

Is it possible to hold space for resistance and tenderness at the same time?

The Last Word

As I reflect on a year of The Intersect, I'm grateful to everyone who has joined me on this journey through the art-tech landscape. The companion podcast has been an experiment worth pursuing, and your continued readership means everything. I've worked to strike a balance with AI coverage—recognizing its significance without letting it dominate our conversations about creativity. If you have thoughts on the newsletter, stories that resonated, or ideas for year two, I'd genuinely love to hear from you.

All the best, Juergen