Beyond the Screen: IRL Art in the Age of Virtual Everything

The pandemic accelerated a shift that had been building for years: the migration of art-making and art-viewing into digital spaces. Galleries moved online, residencies went virtual, openings became Zoom calls. And yet something was lost in translation.

Now, artists are fighting back. Not by rejecting the digital — many of the most exciting IRL practitioners are also deeply embedded in online culture — but by insisting that physical presence, materiality, and the irreducible specificity of a place at a particular moment in time still matter.

The artists featured in this issue work across a range of materials and contexts: street murals that function as QR codes leading to AR overlays; sculptures cast in industrial resin embedded with discarded circuit boards; performance works where audience participation is tracked via RFID tags and visualized in real time. These are not retrograde gestures. They are propositions about what art can do that a JPEG cannot.

Physical art carries weight — literally. It occupies space. It ages. It can be touched, walked around, climbed on. It is vulnerable in ways that a digital file is not. And that vulnerability, these artists argue, is the point.