This article examines the emergence of luminous environments in mid-twentieth-century art through the intertwined histories of Gyula Kosice, Lucio Fontana, and the transnational networks that later formed New Tendencies. Rejecting a linear genealogy from European modernism to Latin America, it argues for Buenos Aires as a generative node where artificial illumination, experimental publishing, and photographic mediation shaped new models of perceptual and spatial experience. Drawing on catalogues, photomontages, manifestos, installation photography, exhibition reviews, and digital archives, the article treats documentation as a constitutive medium that shaped how ephemeral luminous works were produced, circulated, and historicized. Kosice's neon structures, hydrospatial proposals, and early Mad & iacute; publications are contextualized within the electrified urban landscape and experimental print culture of midcentury Buenos Aires. Fontana's Spatialism is reinterpreted through his Argentine connections, emphasizing how debates on invention, perception, and technological modernity informed his environmental experiments with neon and ultraviolet light.
Debates in digital art history have moved on since 'Reframing Art: Opening Up Art Dealers' Archives to Multi-disciplinary Research' was published five years ago. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) of course has entered the game, but digital art historians and digital humanists are now thinking more broadly about what 'digitisation' means. This short personal reflection/commentary argues that this concept has become more complex in the last 25 years or more. Rather than simply making analogue content available online, today's digitisation projects now involve myriad processes of interpretation, human intervention and input - far more so than when digitisation technologies first emerged at scale in the early 2000s. If the debate on digital art history is to move forward, the definitions of, and assumptions about, digitisation, what it is, and what it is for, need to be updated.
