Agile Art Manifesto

In the text below, I outline my vision for the future of art in the 21st century—its modes of creation, presentation, and sustainability. This perspective is rooted in my own artistic practice and informed by the principles of the Agile Manifesto, responsive and universal design, and creative research methodologies.

The text draws inspiration from Olafur Eliasson’s ecological approach to installations, Rafaël Rozendaal’s ethos of digital art, and Aram Bartholl’s critical engagement with technology and public space. It also engages with the theoretical frameworks of thinkers such as Siegfried Zielinski, Stéphane Vial, Don Ihde, Katherine Hayles, and Donna Haraway, integrating critical perspectives on media, technology, and human–technology relations.

At its core, the manifesto embraces minimalist, feminist, and ecological art principles, advocating for inclusivity, equity, and diversity. It also emphasizes simplicity, adaptability, and purposeful innovation as essential strategies for resisting the excesses of contemporary visual culture and digital media environments.

Consequently, Agile Art is:

  • Responsive to its environment and audience,
  • Research-based, rooted in curiosity, prototyping, and experimentation,
  • Imperfect, fluid, evolving, agile.
  • Transparent in its creation and dissemination,
  • Mindful of its ecological and ethical impact.

The process over the product

  • At the heart of art practice lies creative research—rooted in netnography, qualitative observations, and artistic experimentation.
  • The final artwork is not a static endpoint but a fluid reflection of evolving ideas and discoveries.
  • Iteration, prototyping, and imperfection are integral parts of the process, emphasizing the journey of creation over the final product.

Adaptability and scalability

  • Art is created to adapt to diverse environments: from intimate gallery spaces to large-scale public installations.
  • Scalability is at the core of the art work, designed to function across various screen sizes, lighting conditions, and exhibition formats, maintaining its integrity, yet changing in the context.
  • Thus the interaction between the artwork and its environment—ambient light, shadows, screens, or even viewer silhouettes—becomes an active, dynamic element of the experience, evolving with each presentation.

Artwork in the era of digital screens

  • Art should reflect the reality of contemporary media consumption: transient, fragmented, and shaped by mobile screens in dynamic environments.
  • By addressing how technologies and screens influence perception, art should explores the shifting relationship between (v)user, medium, and visual image.
  • Artworks strive to function across multiple platforms and spaces, bridging traditional art spaces and the digital realm.

Technoecology and digital ethics

  • Art should bridges the technological and ecological realms, highlighting their deep interconnection.
  • While examining human perception in a tech-driven world, artist explores the ethical implications of emerging technologies.
  • Consequently, this dual, holistic focus emphasizes the artist’s responsibility to create ethical artworks and critically assess the digital tools that shape them.

Sustainability and low-waste practices

  • Artist should prioritize energy-efficient processes in both creation and exhibition, ensuring a minimal carbon footprint. Artworks are possible to display with standard projectors or advertising screens, avoiding resource-heavy solutions.
  • Artist should reuse materials, open-source tools, and my archives, embedding sustainability into every stage of my practice.
  • Artist should avoids the trend of resource-intensive, site-specific constructions that require transportation and elaborate setups.
  • Simplicity and efficiency are central to Agile Art.

Openess and inclusivity

  • I am constantly woking on making my art more inclusive for people with neurodiversity and blindness.
  • My work critiques issues of access, fairness, and control in digital spaces, encouraging critical engagement with the tools that shape our culture.
  • Moreover, I advocate for transparency and open access, avoiding platforms lacking ethical oversight or democratic values.
  • I engage with platforms, creatively repurposing their functionalities to challenge their opacity and power structures (see my project AI Mirror here).

References

[1]. Bartholl, A. (2012). “Dead Drops and Critical Design in Digital Art.” [Online]. [link][2]. Hayles, N. K. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press. [link]
[2]. Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing. London, UK: BBC/Penguin Books.[16]. Zielinski, S. (2013) The Media Have Become Superfluous. The Composing Rooms. [link]
[3]. Bourriaud, N. (1998). Relational Aesthetics. Paris, FR: Les Presses du réel.

[4]. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC, USA: Duke University Press. [link]
[5]. Eliasson, O. (2015). Reality Machines: Essays on Art and Perception. London, UK: Thames & Hudson. [link]
[6]. Mitchell, W. J. T. (2015). Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics. Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press. [link]
[7]. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. [link][9]. Paul, C. (2003). Digital Art. London, UK: Thames & Hudson. [link]
[8]. Rozendaal, R. (2017). “The Art of Websites and Digital Ownership.” [link][8]. Manovich, L. (2001). The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA, USA: The MIT Press. [link]
[9]. McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York, NY, USA: McGraw-Hill.
[10]. Weibel, P. (1999). “The Aesthetics of Digital Image Processing,” in Ars Electronica 84.
[11]. Vial, S. (2019). The Aesthetics of the Digital: The Pixel, the Interface, and Digital Realism. London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing. [link]
[12]. Zielinski, S. (2006). Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press. [link]