Photography marks the emergence of tech art. The process of capturing the environment light, mixing the chemical solution and developing image on light-sensitive sheets escapes the judgment of artists and adopts a mechanical vision that unbiasedly records the subject. But there is still a sense of objecthood, before digital photography was invented. 

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When image recording technology turned digital, the physicality of the "object" is diminished, replaced by a series of binary code that is then translated and mediated by hardware configuration. Since the essential nature of the “object” is not more than a series of coded information, its representation transcends its presentation. In other words, we care more about “what it can show” than “what it can be. It seems like tech art goes retrospectively to the age of optical-illusion painting, but in a more sociological sense. The autonomy once celebrated in modernism is gone (but maybe I’m wrong because some generative art still have a sense of randomness.)

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The collapse of physicality is also followed by an ambivalent problem of accessibility and ownership. While the artist Vuk Cosic’s vision of unlimited access to web art sounds utopian and reminiscent of the Fluxus Movement - of which we just saw a revive of a similar narrative on Metaverse - the inevitable commercialization and speculation of NFT seems to prove him wrong. Lack of objecthood does not necessarily grant access. Digital artist aaajiao’s work, NTFs_aaajiao, is an encrypted .ZIP file folder that contains four images. While this folder is freely downloadable online, you need purchase the work through a NFT transaction to receive the password and truly acquire this work. The reproduction aspect of tech art also questions the ownership, a long debated agenda since the emergence of conceptual art. Instead of physically possessing the work, an owner now owns a tech art, either by his or her exclusive access to the work, or by the nominal approval from the artist or agency. Technological applications like smart contract or blockchain might play a vital role in the transfer of ownership, on top of the fierce competition between different tech agencies fighting for the authority over the deification of ownership.

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Based on Duchamp’s legacy of found object, we can also say that the artistic intent that is relied on the materiality of the object decreased in tech art, and that "the objects become a means rather an ends in themselves.” (Crowther, 2018) Just as the material of the paper scroll in Schneemann’s performance does not matter, so does the screen that museums use to exhibit the work of digital artists. How is tech art related to the idea of found object? Just like pop art and photorealism mentioned in Crowther’s piece, tech art, in the same way, lacks the artists’ autographic creation. In this way, the meaning represented by tech art must be examined through the relationship between the artist, the beholder, and the inner structural relationship of the artwork, etc. 

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The “object” in tech art lives in a different space that eschews the monitor of traditional power structure. As Vuk Cosic cloned the Documenta website, he challenged its authority of curation - a practice that valorize the cultural value of art. Acts like this are also seen in how meme culture deconstructs the meaning of images. Again we go back to the problem of accessibility and ownership, which might essentially be boiled down to one single question: how does the mechanical reproduction of art, in the digital era, changed the definition of art itself?