What exactly is Digital Art?
As a former Software Engineer, and a lifelong lover of art, it is predictable that I, like most artists, would be attracted to "surrender to the tools and the electronic mystique" (Peter Frank's words) of digital art.Although digital art has been produced since the 1950's, it has not been considered seriously until very recently. Part of the problem was, in my opinion, algorithmic art - there may be an impression that the computer does the art, not the person. Also, suspicion can arise that somehow the art was removed from the "humanness" because a hand did not touch canvas or paper.
As an artist who started out doing traditional-media art, using watercolor, pastel, ink, oil, and acrylic on paper, I can say that the process producing that work and the process producing digital work is one and the same. Instead of a brush, I'm using a mouse or an electronic pen. My methods vary - sometimes I use photograph-based images and manipulate them with a variety of digital tools (the mixed-media work). Other times I scan my traditional media work and combine it, like an electronic collage, with work utilizing digital tools, and sometimes I mix in photograph elements.
Each artwork takes many hours to produce. Although sometimes I do incorporate algorithmic elements, I control the color, texture, and shape manually. I then alter the original using a variety of methods. I usually combine the finished artwork in Photoshop, though not always. In many ways the work I produce is tantamount to a digital collage.
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Digital technology was initially invented for computing and data storage; later it was developed for use in audio and video equipment; and after that was adapted to all manner of communication and imaging, from cell phones to body scans. But all such applications are rooted in the apprehension, storage, transmission, and display of information - that is, of facts, of data, of any useful worldly intelligence - in the form of binary code. At least until the artists got to it.
It is hardly surprising, given the roots of modern art in notions of a revolutionary avant-garde, that progressive artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries devoured new materials, new technologies, and new art forms with a prodigious and omnivorous appetite. Digital technologies are no exception, and whether artists today use digital tools to aid in generating traditional art forms (for example by making virtual sketches toward paintings or sculpture) or as the basis of experimental new art forms that are generated by and/or displayed via binary code, many artists around the world have indeed gone digital.
In selecting the works for DigitalArt.LA, no aesthetic parameters or requirements were set. Artists were free to submit work of any artistic persuasion - and they did, with copious entries that ranged from moving images to interactive installations to still images. Yet it seems that certain aesthetic predilections may have been at work. The works that asserted themselves most strongly tended to be those that integrally and overtly engage digital technology in the final form of the work. Thus, while some very compelling "straight" photography made with digital cameras and print methods is deservedly represented, the preponderance of works here tend to manipulate the factuality of the real world or to invent worlds that exist only in a realm of digital generation and display. The exhibition is characterized less by faithful reportage than by invention, transfiguration, and wonderment.
So while the "ancient" history of digital technology may have its DNA in strictly practical, informational tasking, the interests and imaginations of the artists who have appropriated those technologies in recent years have evolved them into agents of human psyche that, like much art throughout human history, has only a passing focus on things as they are and much more engagement with our dreams, our fears, our desires.
Howard N. Fox
Juror, DigitalArt.LA
Curator of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
info@DigitalArtLA.us
818.487.8028
Los Angeles Digital Art
Melissa Ann Lambert 818.487.8028 info@DigitalArtLA.us
Digital Art for the 21st Century