Nicholas Negroponte had this to say in his book "Being Digital" (1995), p. 14 (paperback):

  Bits have always been the underlying particle of digital computing, but over the past twenty-five years we have greatly expanded our binary vocabulary to include much more than just numbers. We have been able to digitize more and more types of information, like audio and video, rendering them into a similar reduction of 1s and 0s.  

When he read these words in 1996, Artist W. Logan Fry thought this must also apply to other art forms, and added the note: "all art . . ." in the margin. He realized that not just books and music, audio and video, but visual art as well, could be - and was being - expressed by bits. The idea stuck, and he came up with his own formulation of the principle: "All art can be reduced to a sequence of binary bits, zeros and ones in endless succession."

The following year he expressed this principle in a very non-digital way, a painting on a piece of wood. It was the phrase he inscribed on his 1997 painting of Bill Gates, purportedly proclaiming the principle to the world (click on pic for larger view). It was a painting; but in Fry's defense, Negroponte also pondered "The Paradox of a Book," in his introduction to his physical book printed with ink on paper, but with the title and subject - being digital.

  All art can be reduced to a sequence of binary bits... zeros and ones in endless succession  

Fry then looked for a digital way to express his thought about art, and discovered that Jenny Holzer had found the perfect media, albeit LED displays were physical - the work of atoms - not bits. Her digital screen displays were, of course, digital, yet even there, mounted in a physical frame. In 2002, using Holzer's concept, he built not one, but two "born digital" displays in his born digital creation: The Digital Museum of Modern Art.

Using Final Cut Pro X rendering tools, the screen at the top of this gallery is born digital, as well.