I never tire of wandering the masterpiece-filled halls of the Rijksmuseum or marveling at Van Gogh’s energetic impasto, but on this visit, I set out to explore the contemporary creative side of Amsterdam. The city’s digital art scene has quietly taken off. Inside elegant historic buildings, my travel companion and I discovered tech-driven exhibitions with immersive pixel-based displays and innovative use of light and sound. The city is most famous for its Old World artistic traditions, but its digital side is at the forefront.

Nxt Museum

The Nxt Museum opened in 2020 as the first institution in the Netherlands dedicated to “New Media Art.” Though exhibits change every few months, each explores the intersection of art and technology, challenging how we perceive creativity and imagining future landscapes. This multidisciplinary hub hosts in-residence artists, digital classes and various workshops. I visited during the Still Processing exhibition, in which seven artists used large-scale installations to explore how artificial intelligence, with its power to both reveal truth and distort reality, may be reshaping the way we see the world. Rosa Menkman, for example, examined how our brain processes photos taken by humans versus computer-generated images, raising questions about perception in the digital age.

Nxt Museum
Asterweg 22. No phone.