The Digital, the Digitised and the Digitalised (original) (raw)

The Creation of Digital Art in a Post Digital World

As far back as the introduction of the Greek myths – and specifically that of Echo and Narcissus (where Echo is Sound and Narcissus is image) appreciation of the nature of art has been derived from archaic and classical values that promote the idea of interpretation as a meaningful metric of the value of an idea or an object. In his ‘Poetics’, Aristotle posited that diegesis (Echo) is the reporting or narration of events, contrasted with mimesis (Narcissus) which is the imitative representation of them: the distinction is often cast as that between ‘showing’ and ‘telling’. Together with discrimination and comprehension, both of these functions are part of the mechanism of interpretation. When Gutenburg created the printing press which enabled the beginnings of the mass production of text, the concept of reading and interpreting gained even greater historical purchase due to the encoding of meaning in actual objects: books. ‘Interpretation’ was given even greater power within the rise of modernism with the intervention of the Frankfurt School, which fore-grounded the idea of the ‘interpretation’ of art as meaningful and significant. Walter Benjamin reframed and reinterpreted the medieval belief of the power of the relic of the Saint in his famous question: Can the aura of the original be found within its replica? This question is even more pertinent now when art is created within the digital realm and must be reframed once again: Can the aura of the original exist at all, given there is no difference between the original and its copies? By examining new ideas of ‘entrainment’, where immersivity, resonance, synchronicity and direct response become the factors that reveal the potency of art, In this paper I re-examine how art or media events can function without dependence on the idea of interpretation.

Art imitates the Digital

Lumina Journal, 2017

Where is art in the digital era? This essay identifies the digital as an abstract, formal system. Since art has always relied on formal, abstract systems to carry and deliver itself, what are the implications for art in the digital era? Is the digital a site for art, or is it the other way around? Can there be digital art? Identifying limit and boundary problems as the crucial existential problems for the digital, the essay shows that art has always concerned itself with such problems. This prompts the question as to whether it is possible that human existence and art become the same thing in the digital. Because the digital is currently primarily manipulated in the service of globalist economics, this is clearly not (yet) the case, so what does this mean for art? The essay then briefly examines the self-declared movements of dada, post-digital and post-internet art, concluding that these movements are not capable of questioning the digital as digital, before going on to examine some artists whose practice may be providing guiding lights toward a genuinely digital art.

Thinking Art in the Technological World: An Approach to Digital Media Art Creation

Trends, Experiences, and Perspectives in Immersive Multimedia and Augmented Reality, 2019

In this chapter, the authors discuss the use of digital media in the creation of digital art, questioning the evolution of the relationship between technology and concept in communication through art. The intersection of new media and digital art have been opening interesting and seductive new horizons and in parallel, the concept, the understanding, the legitimacy of artistic creation, the role of the artist and the role of the spectator are also redefined. Based on two experimental works of the artist Henrique Silva, the authors analyze and reflect on the relationship of technology, art and virtuality, focusing on concepts like experience, sensory, immersion, communication and interaction in artworks created through digital media.

Art, digitality and consciousness

Proceedings of the 5th conference on Creativity & cognition - C&C '05, 2005

The workshop will explore in depth the nature of freedom and constraint in the creative process in digital fine art from the perspective of embodied mind. The problem is crucial to our understanding of the creative process in fine art. The aims and objectives of the workshop are to bring into visibility critical insights into the creative process, thereby potentially empowering digital artists.

Digital Media and Contemporary Art

in "Mimesis Journal", 2014

The purpose of the paper is to identify some converging lines that appear increasingly strong in the relationship between digital media and contemporary art. A convergence that was widely anticipated (in the Twentieth Century avant-garde movement in general, and especially in its conceptual trends). The paper will give a quick overview of how digital media are offering a new conceptual and operational scenario, reconfiguring on the one hand the expectations of individuals and institutions about digital tools, and on the other offering the artists new opportunities to elaborate their expressiveness and experimental creativity.

The Impacts of Digitalization on Traditional Forms of Art

AM Journal of Art and Media Studies

During the technological revolution, many aspects of human perceptions changed. Now with the method of digitalization, paintings that were once oil on canvas or huge works of art posted in galleries have become merely a replica of themselves, with binary code in the background. The materiality of art has been transferred into a new digital world with code, more familiar to be read by an AI than by humans. Transmediality, at the same time, opens a new concept of perception and changes the way a piece of art should be examined. The main goal of this paper is to determine the key points of transmediality and how they impact artistic and media practices. Through the theories of transmediality, multimodality, and transtextuality, this paper aims to answer how to analyze traditional artistic forms, such as paintings, sculptures, music, literature, analog photographs, films, and architecture that are now digitized into virtual website tours with a digital code mediator. This paper aims to ...

The Computer Medium in Digital Art's Creative Process

Handbook of Research on Computational Arts and Creative Informatics, 2009

Art objects might be described as symbolic objects that aim at stimulating emotions. They reach us through our senses (visual, auditory, tactile, or other). They are displayed by means of physical material (stone, paper, wood, etc.) and combine some patterns to produce an aesthetic composition. They convey some message, normally to suggest some state of mind or to induce an emotion and the consequent feeling on the side of the viewer. Digital art differs from conventional art pieces by the use of computers and computer-based artifacts that manipulate digitally coded information, inheriting the almost unlimited possibilities in interaction, virtualization and manipulation of information the computer medium offers. In this chapter the authors propose to analyze and discuss the concepts and definitions behind digital art, emphasizing how the computer medium is itself the tool and the raw material in its creation, especially if we stress the fact that the conception and design of artistic information content is at the heart of any artistic work. Furthermore the authors present a framework for digital art creation that consists of a common design space where digital artists can smoothly progress from the concept until the final artifact while exploring the computer medium to its maximum potential.

The Aesthetics of Digital Art.pdf

This is an edited version of the Introduction to my book Digital Art, Aesthetic Creation: The Birth of a Medium, published by Routledge in their Advances in Art and Visual Studies series, 2019. In the book, the chapter is entitled ‘Introduction: The Possibility of Art’. If you wish to cite this discussion please refer to the version as presented in the book . The discussion here justifies why digital art can be regarded as an authentically artistic mode of creation, and considers aspects of its creativity.

Art Beyond Digital

Art Beyond Digital, 2018

Digital technology has interfered in all the spheres, private, public and professional, of our society and shaped them. Artists have always used the techniques or technologies of their time to express themselves. To each appropriated innovation thus corresponds a range of works. Yet, it takes time for the art world to integrate new practices and new media. Impatient, the most fervent advocates of digital art have structured themselves into international communities by organizing dedicated events. Their practices have now matured and the public is culturally ready to welcome their creations as it already does in festivals. At the same time, we notice the first signs of digital acceptance in art, both in institutions and in the contemporary art market.