Omar Kholeif

With the birth of contemporary museum culture and the advent of digital technologies, the 21st century has brought a whole new means by which to access art and its histories. How do we re-map the realm of contemporary art in light of a more inclusive awareness, taking into account the unprecedented global movements of artists today and representing the divergent histories of geographies that were once peripheral? The Artists Who Will Change the World is a new global map of art that points to the future. Unlike a traditional atlas, its cartography illustrates a world of international artists who may not yet be household names, but who will undoubtedly shape the art of tomorrow. Omar Kholeif provides an introductory field guide to what some of the most urgent contemporary artists are doing worldwide. These are artists whose work engages with the aesthetics of technology and the issues of tomorrow; artists who are developing concepts rarely tested before, or who are engaging with politics in new ways. The book is a journey of discovery that will influence generations of artists and art lovers to come.

A leading figure in the world of networked culture explores the artists and events that defined the mass medium of our time Since 1989, the year the World Wide Web was born, the art world has grappled with the rise of networked culture. This unprecedented survey of the artists and innovators in this area from 1989 to today is interwoven with the personal narrative of one of the leading voices on the digital world. In this book, Omar Kholeif, whose prolific career parallels the growth of the internet, tells the story of this mass medium and how it has fostered new possibilities for artists, both analog and digital. The book showcases work spanning a range of media from legendary artists including Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Nam June Paik, Heather Phillipson, and Wu Tsang. Tracing the key artists and innovators from the emergence of browser-based art to the dawn of NFTs, this is a tale for the present and the future.