The entanglement of the digital with formerly purely analogue art practices such as sculpture or painting is not just a one-way process. Also under way is its opposite, a return to physicality in work that was primarily or originally digital. As an example of the first we might take the work of French artist Stephane Trois Carrés, who explores painting's capacity to incorporate the digital by associating analogue and digital techniques. He takes a digital photograph of a painting and draws or paints on the printout, producing a hybrid work which then undergoes further digital and manual processes. He also realizes multi-part works consisting of several analogue and digital paintings arranged in a row: the first and last paintings are noticeably different, and the intermediate works are digital prints, each of which represents an intermediate state between the two paintings at either end, so as to create a morphing effect.

Meanwhile, French filmmaker and new media artist  Jacques Perconte takes the opposite tack, imitating painting via digital techniques: his generative video landscapes transform video images into 'live' paintings, by producing moving images in which colours gush from everywhere. These are works that unfold in an extended time frame, lacking a beginning, a middle or an end. Rather than working with sequences of separate images, each new image is an update of the previous one, fusing past and present textures and colours. Perconte's videos are thus in a state of ongoing flux, continually generating images that may never be perceived again. Just as painting is enriched by the digital in the first example, so is the digital enriched by its association with painting in the second.