18-04-2026 | photo
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In We are digital now, anonymous construction marks—a blue ring, white disc and yellow line—transform a weathered concrete wall into a found composition. Echoing urban photography, modernist abstraction and the readymade, the image invites viewers to pause and notice how functional traces can briefly appear intentional, expressive and human.
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A board-formed concrete wall, pitted and weathered, carries three marks sprayed by an unknown hand: an open blue ring, a solid white disc, and a fluorescent yellow line rising from below. They were probably left by construction or survey workers, but framed like this they start to look like a signal, a face, or a simple sentence nobody can quite read. The wall’s lines and seams act as a grid, and the marks sit on it like notes on a staff. The title turns this found arrangement into a command and asks the viewer to do what the city rarely lets us do: stop and look.
I photograph the marks that cities leave for their own workers. Codes sprayed on walls and pavements tell someone where to cut, drill or dig, and then they are forgotten. They weren’t made for us, and that’s what draws me to them.
In We are digital now, three shapes meet on a concrete wall: a ring, a dot and a line. Digital? I didn’t arrange them. I only found the point where they started to talk to each other. For me the work is about the moment of attention when functional traces turn into something that feels intended, even human. The title is both an instruction and an invitation. Before the wall is painted over or torn down, stop and read what it says.
We are digital now belongs to a long tradition of photographers who treat the city wall as a found canvas. In the 1930s Brassaï began photographing graffiti scratched into Paris walls, and those images later became his book Graffiti (1961). He treated anonymous marks as a kind of primitive art. From the 1940s Aaron Siskind photographed flat, close-up details of peeling paint and weathered surfaces, which brought photography close to Abstract Expressionist painting. We are digital now follows both approaches: a flat frontal view, no horizon, and a surface that turns into a picture plane.
The three marks also recall modernist abstraction. In Point and Line to Plane (1926), Wassily Kandinsky described the point, the line and the plane as the basic elements of visual language. Here they appear almost like a diagram, but they were made by a worker’s spray can rather than an artist’s intention.
Presenting marks the artist didn’t make links the work to the found object, from Marcel Duchamp’s readymades to the Nouveaux Réalistes. Jacques Villeglé and Raymond Hains, for example, exhibited torn street posters as art. The wall itself matters too. Board-formed concrete, with the wood grain of its molds still visible, is the béton brut of Le Corbusier and postwar Brutalism, a material that was once utopian and is now often worn and overlooked. We are digital now joins these threads: an anonymous gesture, abstraction and the fading traces of modern architecture, all caught in one moment of attention.
