We are digital artists. We work with code, with screens, with networks, with data, with machines, with sound. We make interactive installations, AI films, generative art, browser based works, XR experiences, motion graphics, creative code performances, electronic music, sound art, spatial audio, live visuals, art games, data visualisations, machine learning experiments, and things that do not yet have names.
We are also women. Many of us spent years in agencies, studios, game studios, sound design, music production, software development, live visuals, because the institutional infrastructure for digital art as a recognised field barely existed for most of our working lives. Some of us were always here but were never seen. Some of us have been performing electronic music or making live visuals for decades in contexts the gallery system has never recognised as legitimate practice. Some of us are also mothers, carers, people who came back to art after the world told us the window had closed. The digital arts have always been entangled with commercial and technical practice in ways that other art forms are not. That entanglement means the path into independent art practice is longer, less linear, and more likely to begin or resume in a person's thirties, forties, or beyond.
We are told the digital arts are for everyone. We are told the sector values diversity, inclusion, access, non linear careers, intersectional thinking. We are told these things by the same organisations that will not let us through the door because we are over 28. Or over 35. Or over 40.
This is age discrimination. It is not a grey area. It is written into eligibility criteria, published on open call pages, built into the architecture of publicly funded programmes.
It also narrows the field. When a sector selects from the same narrow age bracket year after year, it creates a homogeneous and linear career focused culture of competitive artists following a trend driven understanding of what digital art is. Much of this field frames itself around critical practice, claiming to interrogate the systems of exclusion built by big tech and platform capitalism. But a sector that reproduces its own systems of exclusion while critiquing those of others is not engaged in critical practice. It is posturing. It is adhering to the brand guidelines of criticality while critiquing from a framework of blatant exclusion. The depth that comes from lived experience, from years spent inside the systems that digital art claims to critique, from the hard won knowledge of commercial production, of labour, of compromise, is excluded by design. Age based selection does not just discriminate against individuals. It impoverishes the entire field.
And it harms younger artists too. Age capped programmes tell artists in their twenties that there is a clock running. That they must achieve now, produce now, be visible now, or the door will close. This breeds anxiety, not exploration. It encourages artists to treat their work as product, to chase trends rather than develop a practice, to optimise for selection panels rather than take the risks that make work genuinely new. A 24 year old rushing to build a CV before an arbitrary deadline is not being supported. She is being pressured. DWAA exists for her as much as for the artist in her forties who was shut out. The system that excludes one diminishes the other.
DWAA is not opposed to targeted youth provision. Programmes that support young people entering the arts have value and we do not argue for their abolition. What we challenge is the use of age as a proxy for career stage in programmes that claim to support emerging artists. These are different things, and the sector needs to be honest about which one it is doing. We would also note that youth provision without a robust trajectory for visibility and support in later career is not artist development. It is an endless cycle of young artists who are platformed briefly and then discarded, ensuring that the only people in the system with continuity, influence, and lasting authority are the curatorial gatekeepers who select them. Artists pass through. Curators remain. That is not a support structure. It is a power structure.
If an organisation receives public funding and claims to support emerging artists, it should define "emerging" by career stage, not by birth date.
Arts Council England, Creative Scotland, Arts Council of Wales, and other public funders should require funded organisations to justify any age based eligibility criteria under the Equality Act 2010.
DWAA will produce and publish a comprehensive audit of every age capped opportunity in the UK digital arts sector.
DWAA will create platforms for digital art by women and non binary artists whose work has been systematically excluded from age capped programmes.
We are not asking to be given special treatment. We are asking for the removal of a barrier that should never have been erected.
DWAA is a network of women and non binary artists working in digital art who have been directly affected by age based exclusion in the UK arts sector. We are practitioners, not theorists. We bring decades of combined professional experience in creative technology, moving image, interactive media, AI, code, sound, and screen based practice.
We are committed to working constructively with funders, funded organisations, and sector bodies to achieve lasting policy change. We recognise that many organisations have adopted age caps without malicious intent, often inheriting criteria from earlier iterations of their programmes. Our aim is structural reform, not institutional blame. But we are also clear that good intentions do not exempt organisations from their obligations under equality law, and that the persistence of age capped criteria in the face of available alternatives is a choice.
We welcome members at any career stage who share our experience of age based exclusion and our commitment to structural change.
DWAA centres women in its name and its mission. We welcome non binary artists who share the structural experience of gendered career disruption and age based exclusion. The barriers we address, caring responsibilities, gendered pay gaps, the cultural devaluation of older women, the pressure to leverage youth and appearance, are experienced most acutely by women. We are specific about this because specificity is how structural problems get named and solved.