Science & Tech Quote by Steven Levy

Levy’s line lands like an update to the old myth of the lone genius: the artist no longer works “with” technology, but inside it, the way fish live in water they don’t notice. Calling it “the surround” is the tell. He’s not praising gadgets or predicting robot-made masterpieces; he’s pointing at an atmosphere so pervasive it becomes background radiation. The sharpness is in the quiet fatalism: you can opt out of apps, but you can’t opt out of the computational conditions that now shape how culture is made, seen, shared, sold, and remembered.

The intent is journalistic but not neutral. Levy is nudging readers to stop treating “digital art” as a niche genre and recognize that the digital has become a default infrastructure. Even painters and poets operate in a world of algorithmic curation, platform aesthetics, and tools that decide what “looks right” (filters, presets, templates) before an artist makes a single choice. Technology here isn’t merely the brush; it’s the gallery, the critic, the distributor, the audience, and sometimes the patron.

Subtext: the romance of authenticity is now negotiated through systems designed for scale. That doesn’t cheapen art; it changes the stakes. If computer tech is the surround, then artistic rebellion includes fighting the interface, refusing metrics, or deliberately misusing tools. Contextually, this reads as a post-PC, post-smartphone observation: not “artists use computers,” but “computation is the cultural weather.” The weather can inspire, erode, or flood. Ignoring it is the one position you can’t really afford.