Art Book Magazine, ISBN-13: 978-2821600959, English, 194 pages, 2018, France

In digital art, one of the first reference point is the (im)materiality of the subject with the many repercussions it has in its creation and design. This has led different artists over time to experience the opposite path, or giving back some tangible materiality to the digital, exposing the consequent controversies and nature. From Bits to Paper is an exhibition and an artist residency held in Strasbourg, but in this book, which was initially meant as a pure catalogue, it escalates to what Pais calls an ‘aesthetic occurence’. He tries to define through the produced work, a movement of artists working specifically with the ‘rematerialisation’ of digital, or better its alternative embodiment. To corroborate this vision he transverses various elements of the post-digital, including the so-called black-boxed algorithms, the altered perceptions of our physicality and the ’paradox of transparency’ (the more transparent the interface, the more opaque the inner functioning). The book is structured as a series of interviews with the artists discussing their illustrated work, and short essays and conversations, among which is particularly intense the one with Bernard Stiegler, where he affirms that “digital essentially relies on the concealment of processing” and that Google and Facebook are reconfiguring our desires “according to logics over which we have no control”.