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A curator gives work context. An artist makes it. A collector chooses to live with it. None of that happens inside a vacuum — it happens inside structures someone had to build: galleries, platforms, agencies, the infrastructure that lets art and audiences find each other at all. This week we close the series with that builder's perspective.
This is Part 4, the final part, of our Digital Art in Four Perspectives series. Part 1 looked at curatorial practice through Alice Scope, Part 2 at an artist's practice through Auriea Harvey, and Part 3 at collecting through Bharat Krymo. We end with the people building the ecosystem itself, through a conversation with Anne Schwanz and Johanna Neuschäffer, co-founders of OFFICE IMPART.
Meet OFFICE IMPART
Anne Schwanz and Johanna Neuschäffer are the co-founders of OFFICE IMPART, a Berlin-based gallery that has reinvented what a gallery can be by building a flexible, hybrid structure that prioritizes mediation over physical space. OFFICE IMPART operates without permanent walls, works simultaneously with multiple generations of collectors — from established contemporary buyers to first-time digital collectors — and treats digital and analog work with equal seriousness rather than treating digital as a supplement to a "real" program.
Their conviction is straightforward but unusual in practice: a gallery's core value isn't the room it occupies, it's the quality of the connections it builds between artists and the people who live with their work.
What It Takes to Build for Digital Art
The 20th-century gallery model was designed around assumptions — fixed walls, fixed locations, physical and digital work as separate categories — that digital art has made obsolete. Schwanz and Neuschäffer built OFFICE IMPART without those assumptions from the start. A few ideas from their conversation with 100 collectors get at what that meant in practice:
No fixed space as a design choice, not a constraint. Operating without permanent gallery walls wasn't a budget decision — it's a philosophical argument about what actually makes a gallery valuable. The space follows the work and the relationship, rather than the other way around.
Digital and analog treated as genuine equals. Most galleries fold digital work into physical programming as a supplement. OFFICE IMPART built its structure to treat both with equal weight, which requires different skills, different collector conversations, and different artist relationships than the conventional hierarchy assumes.
Mediation as the actual service. Schwanz and Neuschäffer describe their role as mediators — people who create the conditions under which art and audiences can find each other — rather than exhibitors. It's a more honest description of what a gallery does, and it demands a different kind of ongoing work than staging shows.
Fluency across collector generations. Working with both established contemporary collectors and first-time digital buyers at once requires real range. OFFICE IMPART's reach across generations reflects a commitment to expanding who collects, not just what gets collected.
Why the Builder's Perspective Matters
It's easy to think about digital art as a chain that runs from artist to curator to collector. But the systems in between — the galleries, the platforms, the agencies willing to build new models rather than force digital work into old ones — determine what collectors can even access, and how they're introduced to it. OFFICE IMPART is a working example of what that infrastructure can look like when it's designed for digital art rather than adapted to it after the fact.
Listen to the Full Conversation
This article draws from Unlocked, the podcast by 100 collectors — conversations with the artists, curators, collectors, and builders shaping the digital art world, with no market speculation and no hype.
🎧 Listen to the full episode with OFFICE IMPART
Go Deeper: Perception Loops
To close out the series, we're pairing this episode with Diane Drubay's essay Perception Loops, a reflection on an exhibition she curated pairing aurèce vettier and Patrick Tresset — artists whose work asks what it means to be seen by a machine that perceives the world on entirely different terms. It's a fitting final note: after four weeks looking at how digital art is contextualized, made, collected, and supported, Perception Loops asks a quieter question underneath all of it — what does it mean to be seen at all, by something that doesn't see the way we do?
That closes Digital Art in Four Perspectives. Thank you for following the series — we hope it sends you back into the archive with a few new lenses for looking at digital art.
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Catch up on the full summer series about digital art in 4 perspectives:
Part 1: The Curator's Perspective
Part 2: The Artist's Perspective
Part 3: The Collector's Perspective
Part 4: The Builder's Perspective
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100 collectors is a global membership network for digital art lovers and collectors.