The Spalter collection and the AB[500]

A Fidenza on paper, a plotted watercolor, an embroidered grid. The Anne and Michael Spalter Digital Art Collection brings seventeen AB[500] artists into a history of computer art that extends well beyond the screen.

Yesterday, in Paper trail: the physical editions of the AB[500], I wrote about the prints, plots and objects made by artists in the first five hundred Art Blocks projects. Leyla (@leyla_solos)’s conversation with Michael Spalter for Verse (@verse_works) offers a timely companion: a collection in which the physical life of digital art is central.

The Spalter collection places early computer art and contemporary generative practice in the same field of view. Its published account describes a particular commitment to plotter drawings, alongside works on paper, sculpture and film. Artists in its directory include Vera Molnár, Frieder Nake, Manfred Mohr, Georg Nees, Charles Csuri and Harold Cohen. Seventeen artists represented in the first five hundred Art Blocks projects also appear there. The connection runs through objects as much as through code.

For an Art Blocks collector, the names offer a familiar entry point. The materials complicate that familiarity. Spalter catalogues Tyler Hobbs’s Fidenza #517 as a pigment print on paper. Its Dmitri Cherniak record, Ringers #993, 886, 867, 888, describes archival inkjet printing. These are material encounters with systems that many people first met through a browser. The catalogue establishes the presence of those physical works; it does not establish ownership of their corresponding tokens.

That emphasis is striking after Paper trail, but it would be wrong to call Spalter Digital exclusively physical. Its public catalogue also lists Elman Mansimov’s A Group of Happy Elephants in the Dry Grass Field #10 with the medium “NFT”, and Carla Gannis’s The Garden of Emoji Delights as video. Even within the AB[500] overlap, Claudia Hart’s The Look Glass Magic Mirror combines porcelain, an iPad, video and augmented reality. The interesting connection is the collection’s sustained attention to material form, alongside digital and hybrid works.

What the objects bring into view

The collection’s overlap with Art Blocks is particularly revealing where it departs from the best-known series. Anna Lucia’s seven Oefenstof records describe embroidery in cotton fabric and polyester thread. Licia He’s Fictional Lullaby is a plotter-rendered generative painting. Julien Gachadoat and Iskra Velitchkova are represented by plotted ink drawings, while Lars Wander’s Lines Walking #28 is catalogued as a plotter drawing in watercolor. Reading these materials together makes a useful question visible: what happens when a computational instruction has to pass through a pen, a thread or a fluid?

Other holdings enlarge the picture further. Claudia Hart’s objects combine porcelain with augmented reality; Sasha Stiles’s Cursive Binary works use pencil, calligraphy ink and acrylic. Zach Lieberman has twenty-seven catalogue records, largely prints from his Daily Sketches, alongside later light and noise studies. Here the algorithm belongs to a continuing practice of making, selecting and translating, with a life before and beyond a particular release.

The shared Code + Matter Portfolio brings Alexis André, William Mapan and Florian Zumbrunn into the inventory through a single catalogue record, described as an artist’s book and risographs on paper. It is counted once in the collection total and listed under each participating artist below. That distinction matters: an artist’s presence in a collection can take the form of a contribution to a collective object.

Four decades of collecting

In Michael Spalter: Four Decades of Collecting Digital Art, published by Verse Talks on 19 September 2026, Michael joins Leyla for a conversation about the collection, computer-art pioneers and Charles Csuri. The published chapter guide locates the discussion of NFTs, Art Blocks and generative art at 39:59, and collecting as stewardship at 52:15.

That long view is productive for the AB[500]. A series register records a release, its editions and its place in a platform’s history. A collection can put the artist’s other decisions beside it: paper, scale, process, selection, the possibilities of a book or an object. The following inventory connects those two accounts, work by work and artist by artist.