Perception in Flux

Perceiving an artwork today means moving through a landscape where physical and digital dimensions continuously intersect.

The experience of art no longer rests on the division between object and image. It unfolds as a shifting field of negotiation, where body and signal, presence and transmission, co-construct the encounter. Neuroscience has confirmed what artists intuited long before: perception is never neutral. Every act of seeing is shaped by memory, by touch, by context.

In this inquiry, the trajectory of perception is traced from early fresco traditions to immersive digital environments, from the weight of monumental material to the ephemerality of LED screens, from the density of matter to the distributed logic of the network, from the aura of authenticity to the fluid property of hybrid culture. The focus is not on the medium itself but on how each artwork reorganizes perception, creates new architectures of experience, and redefines the relation between senses, space, and presence.

The Material Encounter

Speaking of art always begins with matter. Before interpretation, before narrative, there is the encounter, visceral and embodied. To meet a material artwork is to enter a multisensory transaction between body and substance. Stone presses back. Bronze resonates. Pigment saturates. Each medium carries its own gravity, its own density of presence. A fresco holds time differently from a polished steel surface. A sculpture reshapes pathways of movement, drawing the body into proximity or forcing distance, absorbing or reflecting light. Material presence participates actively in perception.

Contemporary neuroscience supports this. Research on multisensory integration shows that perception emerges from synthesis across senses. Vision shifts through touch, sound resonates with space, and the brain produces coherence by merging multiple inputs.
No artwork is ever perceived in isolation from its environment.
The thickness of canvas, the echo of a gallery, the temperature of a room all shape the encounter. Giotto embedded pigment into sacred architecture. Serra’s steel reorganizes bodily orientation. Turrell’s luminous environments suspend the viewer in perceptual tension where matter dissolves into light.

Material encounter is not a stylistic option but a way of transmitting density, resistance, and duration. It grounds the artwork in a shared world of things and secures a grammar of presence. For centuries, this has been the guarantor of value. Yet as signals and virtual architectures expand, matter itself begins to transform rather than disappear.

The Digital Threshold

Where the physical world relies on weight, density, and temporal opacity, the digital introduces an entirely new infrastructure of perception. The support becomes a constellation of signals: electric impulses, binary code, protocols, pixels.
Behind every image lies a hidden materiality of glass, silicon, copper, and electromagnetic waves.
As neuroscientist David Eagleman observes, the brain makes no distinction between light reflected from marble and light emitted by a screen. Both become electrical signals for the nervous system.

Artists anticipated this shift decades ago. Nam June Paik sculpted electricity. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer transformed data into perceptual environments. Bill Viola expanded the duration of vision until time itself became tension. With digital art, the artwork becomes an interface. Perception unfolds between device and spectator, between signal and reception. The threshold is no longer an entrance into a gallery but the click that activates, the scroll that initiates.

This changes the grammar of reception. Time compresses, access multiplies, physical distance dissolves.
Yet questions arise: what happens to perception when friction vanishes, when the artwork can be closed with a gesture or skipped with a scroll? The digital threshold expands the reach of art, yet it also demands a new attentiveness.
The digital is not absence of matter but another form of matter. It calls for new codes of reading and new forms of presence.

Internet as an Embodied Condition

The internet functions as a medium of transmission and as an atmosphere we inhabit. Artworks online never exist in isolation; they unfold within the wider topology of the network. With continuous connectivity, perception becomes doubled. The body remains anchored in a place, while consciousness flows through remote presences, delayed signals, and parallel streams. Every interaction with a digital artwork takes place inside this distributed condition.

Cognitive studies demonstrate that tools extend thought. The device is not a container for content but an active component of mind.
Viewing art online means inhabiting a system where image and cognition co-produce experience. Each artwork exists within architectures of latency, indexing, and distribution. Presence appears partial, situated, intermittent. This fragmentation constitutes a new perceptual language.

Artists who operate digitally engage these infrastructures directly. Exhibiting online means designing for screen formats, loading times, and algorithmic visibility. The gesture is both compositional and infrastructural. Internet has reshaped presence itself: artworks circulate, archive, and sediment across feeds, reposts, caches, and blockchains.
The digital condition affirms its own authenticity as the very material through which art becomes thinkable today.

Cultural Narratives of Distinction

The division between physical and digital art arises from cultural narratives, not perceptual truth. For centuries, institutions linked artistic value to ritual permanence, rarity, and the sacred object. Aura, as Benjamin described, attached itself to stability and location. Digital distribution disrupted that order, producing accessibility without transport, replication without scarcity. Suspicion emerged because authority was bound to material preservation.

Phenomenology dismantles this suspicion. Maurice Merleau-Ponty described perception as embodied relation between body and environment. Meaning is not guaranteed by material substance but by the position of perception. Pixel and marble both carry experience, interpreted through context. The digital was categorized as “media art,” as if reduced to technology, yet media is only a vehicle. Every medium is redefinable.

Institutions still struggle with this transition, often treating digital work as an exception to be justified.
Yet art has never been static.
Every rupture, from Cubist collage to performance, shifted the perceptual field. Digital art continues this trajectory. It distributes perception, extends gesture into networks, and redefines authenticity as intensity of experience rather than uniqueness of object.

The Collector’s Dilemma

If perception operates across body, image, and infrastructure, why does collecting still maintain a rigid line between physical and digital? The answer lies in the psychology of possession.
Collecting has always meant incorporating art into identity. A painting on a wall is a reassuring presence with weight, fragility, and duration. Digital works, even when secured and archived, remain intangible, coded, circulating through wallets and protocols.

The collector moves between two paradigms: conservation and participation. One depends on permanence, archives, and walls; the other thrives on fluidity, smart contracts, and networks. Both require rituals that build trust. In the digital sphere, new rituals emerge: provenance encoded in hashes, property confirmed through blockchain, visibility shaped by interfaces.

Resistance persists because collectors search for the body of the artwork.
Yet absence of material does not mean absence of significance. Intangible forms often move us more deeply: a memory, a sound, an image passing through a feed.
The future of collecting will expand across hybrid terrains. Value will be measured by capacity to generate presence, attention, and engagement, whether on a wall or on a screen. The collector becomes not only a custodian but a participant, not only a possessor but an activator.

Perception operates as a continuum in transformation, where matter and signal, object and code, converge into evolving grammars of experience. To engage art today means to inhabit this continuum with awareness, recognizing perception itself as the material through which culture unfolds.