Top 10 Most Iconic Video & Digital Artworks of the 21st Century

What are the most iconic audiovisual artworks of the 21st century so far—including video, video installation, and digital art? The question is difficult because the category itself has become almost suspiciously elastic. Since 2000, it has come to include multi-channel installations, virtual worlds, documentary montage, immersive environments, algorithmic images, desktop videos, and AI-generated works—often all at once. The works on this list became iconic for different reasons: some for their political urgency, others for their formal ambition, or technological precision. Audiovisual art may be an imperfect umbrella term, but these works are not united merely because they move, make noise, or require electricity. They belong together because they use new media as an artistic language to approach the present, revisit the past, and imagine the future in ways older disciplines could not—as the following ten works make abundantly clear.

1. Francis Alÿs — When Faith Moves Mountains (2002)

On April 11, 2002, hundreds of volunteers gathered on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, and, armed with shovels, formed a single line at the base of a massive sand dune in the Ventanilla desert. Over the course of the day, they shoveled their way forward in unison, collectively displacing the dune by roughly ten centimeters from its original position. The action, organized by Belgian-born, Mexico City–based artist Francis Alÿs (b. 1959) in collaboration with curator Cuauhtémoc Medina and filmmaker Rafael Ortega, took place as part of the Third Ibero-American Biennial of Lima and was conceived as a response to the social and political upheaval that accompanied the fall of President Alberto Fujimori’s regime. The title is simultaneously filled with hope—in which faith itself can move mountains—and disillusioning, illustrating how an exorbitant amount of effort results in almost invisible change. Even though the task itself sounds impossible, it did not demotivate the crowd involved. On the contrary, it motivated the volunteers to unite and work harder toward a common goal—a powerful image of social unification and willingness in times of need.

What makes When Faith Moves Mountains so enduring is not the spectacle of a dune being moved—which, as Alÿs himself acknowledged, yielded no practical result—but the proposition that a poetic gesture can carry political weight, and vice versa. An artistic strategy that no other artist does better than Francis Alÿs—try to prove me wrong, you won’t be able to. The work, as often with Alÿs, enacts a parable: maximum effort for minimum outcome, a literal rendering of the biblical expression from which it takes its name. In a Latin American context shaped by decades of frustrated collective action, that futility becomes deeply resonant, but so does the faith that precedes it—the conviction that at times of political upheaval, unity can make the impossible feel within reach. The work has been exhibited numerous times since its debut, from the Museo de Arte de Lima to the Museum of Modern Art, and it remains one of the defining examples of how performance, video, and social engagement can converge in a single, seemingly absurd yet utterly powerful gesture.

2. Pipilotti Rist — Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) (2008)

In November 2008, Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist (b. 1962) achieved something that had eluded almost every artist who had attempted it before: she tamed the vast and notoriously difficult atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Commissioned by MoMA, Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) is a monumental multi-channel video installation in which twenty-five-foot-high projections wrap seamlessly across the atrium’s walls, immersing the entire space in slow-moving, luminously colored imagery. At the center sits a large iris-shaped couch, surrounded by concentric rings of plush carpeting in blue and fuchsia, all designed by the artist. Visitors were invited to remove their shoes and lie down, and many did—tourists napped, couples embraced, children played. Jerry Saltz memorably noted that Rist had effectively feminized a bastion of institutional masculinity, and Karen Rosenberg, writing in The New York Times, called it arguably the first project to humanize the atrium.

The imagery itself is vintage Rist—a slow-motion parade of flowers, bodies, fruit, water, and earth, all drenched in saturated color and drifting between paradise and unease. A woman bites into an apple while a pig mirrors the gesture; blood-stained fabric floats through water; hands caress earthworms. Through it all, Rist characteristically fuses sensuality and provocation with an almost hypnotic gentleness. In a moment when video art was often perceived as cold, cerebral, or difficult, Pipilotti Rist suggests that it could also be generous, warm, overwhelming, and physical. The installation drew enormous crowds and remains one of the most talked-about site-specific projects in MoMA’s recent history. 

3. Cao Fei (China Tracy) — RMB City: A Second Life City Planning (2007-2009)

Cao Fei (b. 1978, Chinese) began planning RMB City in 2007, and with it, she created one of the most ambitious and visionary digital artworks of the early 21st century. Named after the Chinese unit of currency, the renminbi (RMB), RMB City is a sprawling, surrealist virtual metropolis built within the online platform Second Life, navigated and curated by Cao Fei’s avatar, China Tracy. The city compresses iconic landmarks—Tiananmen Square, the Bird’s Nest stadium, shipping containers, barbed wire—into a hallucinatory landscape that parodies China’s breakneck urban development while simultaneously inhabiting it. What made RMB City so groundbreaking was not its novelty as a virtual world as art, but its function as one—a living platform for social, artistic, and political exchange over several years. 

The city officially opened to the public in January 2009, with art collector Uli Sigg appointed as its first virtual mayor. Artists were invited to create works within it, institutions organized events, and Cao Fei herself produced a series of films and performances that emerged from and circled back into the project, including RMB City Opera (2009), a stage performance that combined live actors with Second Life avatars. By treating a virtual environment as a genuine site for cultural production, Cao Fei anticipated much of what would later unfold around the metaverse, digital ownership, and virtual community—long before those terms entered mainstream discourse. As an artwork, RMB City remains one of the most prescient and formally daring responses to the digital transformation of everyday life in the 21st century, and a landmark achievement in the history of net and new media art. 

4. Christian Marclay — The Clock (2010)

Christian Marclay’s (b. 1955, American-Swiss) The Clock (2010) is, by almost any measure, one of the most extraordinary artworks produced in the 21st century. It is a 24-hour video montage composed of thousands of clips from film and television—approximately 12,000 in total—each featuring a clock, a watch, or a reference to time. The clips are edited and synchronized so that the time shown on screen always corresponds to the actual time of day in the room where the work is being exhibited. The Clock is, therefore, both an artwork and a functioning timepiece—an object that collapses the distinction between representation and reality with an almost absurd precision. Marclay worked on the project for three years, assembling a team to trawl through vast quantities of footage while he edited the sequences himself, building loose thematic arcs across the hours: waking, eating, commuting, drinking, dreaming, dying. What makes it so compelling is perhaps its dual nature as both a memento mori and an engine of cinematic pleasure: it confronts the viewer with the relentless passage of time while making that passage irresistible to watch. 

The work premiered at White Cube in London in October 2010 and rapidly became a phenomenon. It won the Golden Lion at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, and Marclay, accepting the prize, thanked the jury for giving The Clock its fifteen minutes—a nod to Warhol’s famous prophecy, made all the more ironic by the fact that the work itself lasts 1,440 of them, and has remained famous for every minute of the day ever since. Six editions were produced, all acquired by major institutions, including the Tate, the Centre Pompidou, the Israel Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the National Gallery of Canada—making it one of the largest acquisitions in the history of video art. Wherever The Clock is shown, audiences queue for hours and stay for more; MoMA drew over 40,000 visitors during a single month-long presentation. Zadie Smith, writing in The New York Review of Books, described it as sublime. The Guardian called it a masterpiece. Today, we simply reaffirm its rightful place in recent art history as one of the most iconic artworks of our time—pun intended.

5. Bouchra Khalili — The Mapping Journey Project (2008–2011)

Bouchra Khalili (b. 1975, Moroccan-French) began The Mapping Journey Project in 2008, producing eight video works over three years. Each follows the same format: a single, uninterrupted shot of a geopolitical map, upon which a hand draws a thick line with a permanent marker while a voice narrates the journey it represents. The individuals speaking—encountered by Khalili in transit hubs across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East—are migrants who have been forced by political and economic circumstances to cross borders illegally. Their faces are never shown. What the viewer sees is the hand, the line, and the map; what the viewer hears are the voices, in Arabic, Italian, or English, recounting routes taken by foot, by boat, by truck, under cover of night, through deserts, and across seas. The work was shown in its entirety at MoMA in 2016, where the eight screens were installed throughout the Marron Atrium, and it is in the museum’s permanent collection.

By showing only the hand and the map, Khalili refuses the visual codes that typically accompany representations of migration in the media—no faces, no desperation, no rescue footage. Instead, she returns agency to the narrators through their own voices and gestures. The use of a permanent marker is not incidental: as Khalili herself has emphasized, the drawn lines permanently alter the existing map, as if lived geography were literally overwriting the legal geography. Each trajectory defies the map’s borders, revealing a parallel cartography of survival, improvisation, and resistance. The work has since been shown at venues including documenta in Athens and Kassel in 2017, the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, and the Venice Biennale. It remains one of the most powerful and formally inventive responses to the Mediterranean migration crisis, and one of the defining works of politically engaged art in the 21st century.

6. Ragnar Kjartansson — The Visitors (2012)

Ragnar Kjartansson’s (b. 1976, Icelandic) The Visitors was filmed in a single take at Rokeby Farm, a crumbling 19th-century estate in upstate New York once belonging to the Astor family. The work is a nine-channel video installation, each screen showing a different room of the mansion—or, in one case, the porch outside—in which a musician performs simultaneously with the others. Kjartansson himself sits in a claw-foot bathtub, strumming an acoustic guitar; in adjacent rooms, his friends and collaborators play cello, accordion, piano, banjo, and drums, while a small choir gathers on the veranda. The lyrics, based on a poem by Kjartansson’s ex-wife Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir, are sung in a slow, hypnotic loop that builds over the course of more than an hour. The title references ABBA’s final album, The Visitors (1981), recorded at a time when the band members’ personal relationships had already collapsed—a parallel that haunts the work. 

Each screen offers a portrait of a single musician absorbed in the act of playing, yet the sound—ambient, slightly out of sync, drifting from room to room—binds them into a collective experience that feels larger than any one of its parts. In September 2019, The Guardian ranked The Visitors first in their list of the best artworks of the 21st century, with critic Adrian Searle calling it an extended farewell to romanticism. The Washington Postpublished a full oral history of the work in 2021, treating it as a modern masterpiece. It has since been shown at, or collected by, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Hirshhorn Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, and many others. It is, in my humble opinion, one of those rare works that you can return to again and again and find something new each time—not in the imagery, but in yourself.

7. Hito Steyerl — How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013)

Hito Steyerl’s (b. 1966, German) How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File is a fourteen-minute single-channel video that adopts the format of an instructional tutorial—the kind you might find on YouTube—to deliver a razor-sharp meditation on visibility, surveillance, and the politics of the digital image. An automated male voice guides the viewer through a series of tongue-in-cheek lessons on how to become invisible: hide behind something, be smaller than a pixel, live in a gated community, or simply be female and over fifty. Steyerl herself appears on screen to demonstrate some of these strategies, at one point smearing green paint across her face until she is chroma-keyed into disappearance. The work premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2013, installed, as Steyerl joked, in a location reachable only by swimming two canals and climbing a wall. It was acquired by MoMA for its permanent collection in 2014.

Beneath the deadpan humor, the work operates on a rather unsettling plane. Its visual point of departure is a USAF resolution test target—a pattern of concrete slabs painted in the California desert during the Cold War to calibrate aerial surveillance cameras. The title borrows its first half from a Monty Python sketch, but the humor is a delivery mechanism for ideas that are anything but light—about who gets to be seen, who is forced into visibility, and who is made to vanish. Steyerl, who is also one of the most incisive art theorists of her generation, has argued that images no longer represent reality but actively construct it, and How Not to Be Seen remains the most vivid and accessible demonstration of that thesis. The work has become arguably the single most referenced video artwork of the 2010s.

8. Camille Henrot — Grosse Fatigue (2013)

Camille Henrot’s (b. 1978, French) Grosse Fatigue is a thirteen-minute video that tries to tell the story of the creation of the universe from a computer desktop—which is, of course, an absurd idea, and therefore a very good one. Created during a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the work draws from the museum’s immense collections, combining footage of artifacts, animals, scientific specimens, books, bodies, hands, screens, and archival images into a restless flow of windows opening, overlapping, and disappearing. It looks like someone tried to fit the entire history of existence into a laptop and then forgot to close any tabs. Over this visual avalanche, a spoken-word text moves between science, anthropology, religion, mythology, and poetry, with the pace of a mind that has had too much coffee and not enough sleep. The result is brilliant, exhausting, occasionally funny, and painfully familiar: the same anxiety I experience when working past midnight with dozens of tabs open, no longer able to capture, order, or control all that information—perhaps because the human brain was never meant to, yet here we are.

What makes Grosse Fatigue so good is that it understands something very simple about the 21st century: we do not suffer from a lack of information, but from the fact that there is far too much of it, and that somehow, we are still expected to make sense of everything before lunch. Henrot takes the encyclopedic fantasy of the museum—the old dream of collecting, naming, classifying, and understanding the world—and drops it inside the operating system of the internet age, where knowledge no longer arrives as a well-ordered archive, but as a pile-up of windows, links, images, myths, facts, and half-digested associations. It is funny because it is accurate; it is unsettling for the same reason. Presented at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, where Henrot won the Silver Lion, Grosse Fatigue quickly became one of the defining video works of the decade. And rightly so. Few artworks have captured the strange fatigue of contemporary knowledge with such precision: that very modern condition of knowing too much, understanding too little, and still opening another tab.

9. Arthur Jafa — Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016)

Arthur Jafa’s (b. 1960, American) Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death is a seven-and-a-half-minute video that accomplishes something most feature-length films never even approach: it condenses the full sweep of the Black American experience—its beauty, its terror, its transcendence, and its trauma—into a single, devastating montage. Set to Kanye West’s gospel-inflected anthem “Ultralight Beam” (2016), the work weaves together footage shot by Jafa himself with clips sourced from films, newscasts, sporting events, music videos, citizen recordings, and the internet. The figures who appear span the spectrum of fame and anonymity: Martin Luther King Jr., Nina Simone, Serena Williams, Biggie Smalls, Barack Obama singing “Amazing Grace” after the Charleston church massacre—but also street dancer Storyboard P, families at a wedding, and unnamed Black men and women captured in moments of joy, resistance, and violence.

The formal intelligence of Love Is the Message is inseparable from its emotional power. Jafa, who spent decades as a cinematographer, has described his approach as “Black Visual Intonation,” a strategy in which images are placed in affective proximity to one another, their pacing and sequencing modeled on the rhythmic structures of African American music. The montage alternately slows and accelerates, syncing with and then resisting the music, producing a counter-rhythm that mirrors the whiplash between celebration and mourning that defines the work’s emotional register. The work has been acquired by institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Hirshhorn Museum (jointly), SFMOMA, Tate, and many others, making it one of the most widely collected video artworks of recent years. 

10. Refik Anadol — Unsupervised (2022)

Refik Anadol’s (b. 1985, Turkish-American) Unsupervised was installed on a twenty-four-foot-tall LED screen in the ground-floor lobby of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in late 2022, and it immediately became one of the most talked-about—and most divisive—artworks of the decade. The work uses a machine-learning model trained on publicly available metadata for MoMA’s entire collection of over 138,000 artworks to generate a continuous, ever-shifting flow of multidimensional abstract imagery. Visitors lounged on couches in the lobby. Some danced. Many filmed and most posted. The exhibition was extended several times, ultimately running for nearly a year and drawing over three million visitors. MoMA subsequently acquired the work for its permanent collection.

And yet—here is where it gets complicated. Jerry Saltz, writing for New York Magazine, dismissed it as a massive techno lava lamp and a half-million-dollar screensaver. Ben Davis, in Artnet News, acknowledged it was amusing but warned that this style of art felt emblematic of a moment in which a tech aesthetic of perpetual novelty had become culturally dominant at the expense of the humanities. Travis Diehl of The New York Timesarrived at the same conclusion in fewer words: only a screensaver. We, too, would tend to lean in that direction. Unsupervised is undeniably mesmerizing to look at, but watching it can feel like doom scrolling on a monumental scale. The question is whether the work invites genuine reflection on what art and machine intelligence could mean to one another, or whether it simply offers the aesthetic equivalent of cheap dopamine: a frictionless, endlessly morphing visual spectacle that rewards the gaze without ever challenging it—let alone anything else. So in this list, Unsupervised earns its place not because the debate is settled, but precisely because it is not. 

Last Updated on May 28, 2026