Techspressionism: Digital and Beyond curated by Colin Goldberg for the Southampton Arts Center, Summer 2022.
Drone Footage Courtesy Joanna Steidle // Hamptons Drone Photos
Techspressionism: “Expressionism for the 21st Century.”
In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, three artists with deep Hamptons roots—Colin Goldberg, Oz Van Rosen, and Steve Miller — alongside artist Patrick Lichty, who joined from Abu Dhabi, came together on Zoom to launch Techspressionism. This new movement, which has been described as —“Expressionism for the 21st Century”—emerged at a pivotal moment shaped by three major shifts: the global push into digital life because of the pandemic, the explosion of mobile apps empowering everyday people to be creative, and the rise of machine-human collaboration in art.
Techspressionism builds upon a lineage rooted in the Hamptons, where Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner lived and worked. Guided by Helen Harrison, a renowned Hamptons-based art historian and former director of the Pollock-Krasner House, Techspressionism has quickly become a global phenomenon, with over 350+ artists from 45 countries and over 80,000 Instagram posts using the hashtag.
techspressionism
/tek-spresh-uh-niz-uh m/
- An artistic approach in which technology is utilized as a means to express emotional experience.
- A 21st-century artistic and social movement.
ARTIST INTERVIEW
Sasha Stiles interviewed by Colin Goldberg
Sasha is a Kalmyk-American poet and language artist whose award-winning work bridges tradition and innovation through hybrid poetics, generative imagination, and collaborative intelligence. Her work “A LIVING POEM” is on display at MoMA thru Spring 2026.
ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSIONS
“Each age finds its own technique”.
– Jackson Pollock
Commentary by Helen A. Harrison
Former Director, Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, 1990-2024
In 1928, ruminating on the rapid pace and profound nature of change in the twentieth century, the French poet and philosopher Paul Valéry wrote: “We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.” This prediction so impressed the cultural critic Walter Benjamin that he used it as the epigraph of his famous 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (as it was originally titled). These writers and others were pondering the same issues that face the artists who now, nearly a century later, self-identify as Techspressionists.
Thanks to digital technologies and the Internet, works of art have become, in Valéry’s formulation, ubiquitous; as he foresaw, “We shall only have to summon them and there they will be.” This level of accessibility requires us to adopt and accept new attitudes toward creative expression. As Benjamin observed, the debate regarding the artistic validity of new media, begun with photography and cinema in the late nineteenth century, centers on the so-called aura of the singular work of art. And the aura of uniqueness remains powerful. Yet a digitally-generated artwork is not a reproduction in the conventional sense—that is, a copy of something else—though it can be, and often is, reproduced in multiples that are indistinguishable one from another.
Hand-made versus mechanical. One-off versus duplication. Such binaries ultimately resolve in light of the works of art themselves. By whatever technique it’s created, Techspressionist imagery generates its own aura, deriving its authenticity from the artist’s intention. Expression is paramount; technology is merely the delivery system. Jackson Pollock faced a similar concern. Frustrated by the focus on his materials and methods rather than the content of his paintings, he insisted, “It doesn’t make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something is being said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.”
Techspressionism: Digital and Beyond opening reception at Southampton Arts Center, April 23, 2022.
Left to right: Diane Marsella, Carter Hodgkin, Renata Janiszewska (on iPad), Darcy Gerbarg, Mary Boochever, Tommy Mintz, Verneda Lights, Tom Dunn (SAC Executive Director), Nina Sobell, Roy Nicholson, Nina Yankowitz, Roz Dimon, Colin Goldberg, ScoJo, Steve Miller, Patrick Lichty, Tali Hinkis (kneeling), Christine Sciulli (kneeling), John Zieman (back row), Kyle Lapidus, Mary Ann Strandell, Holly Gordon, Michael Rees (back row) Dalton Portella (kneeling), Joe Diamond (SAC General Manager), Dan Welden, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, Anne Spalter, Gregory Little. Artworks behind group by Frank Gillette.
Over 300 people were in attendance for the exhibition opening on April 23, 2022 at Southampton Arts Center, including over 30 of the artists in the exhibition, from as far away as Australia. View opening reception photo galleries on James Lane Post and Hamptons.com.