This paper will examine early forays into the digital such as Michel Majerus’ digital projections, that included his virtual archive of Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes by Willem de Kooning and others. It also explores the ways through which Albert Öhlen’s digital paintings navigate the tensions between virtual shapelessness and factual form. Both artists tested the ways through which these clashes of virtual and material, functional and autonomous, might generate new sensory experiences. Several decades later artists such as Jacqueline Humphries, Firelei Báez, Aria Dean and Julie Mehretu are more forthright: In different ways they use digital mechanisms and reproduced images of violence to retrieve in their paintings and sculptures empathy, subjectivity and sensation.