{"id":5980,"date":"2022-09-06T11:19:13","date_gmt":"2022-09-06T11:19:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-blog-lb-526867726.eu-central-1.elb.amazonaws.com\/?p=5980"},"modified":"2022-09-13T03:05:23","modified_gmt":"2022-09-13T03:05:23","slug":"what-is-digital-art-then","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.niio.com\/blog\/what-is-digital-art-then\/","title":{"rendered":"What is digital art, then?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ask Me Anything by Pau Waelder<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ask Me Anything is a series of articles in the form of conversations, aiming to clarify certain terms, techniques, and debates related to digital art<\/em>. Our Senior Curator puts 20 years of expertise in digital art at your service to answer your questions, taking only 5 minutes of your time.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Illustration generated using OpenAI’s DALL-E 2<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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So, what is digital art?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Digital art is art created with digital technologies, namely computers. It is also art that addresses how digital technologies are changing us humans, our societies, and the environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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But nowadays everyone uses computers. What is so new about digital art?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Actually, digital art is not new, it is at least 60 years old. It was in the early 1960s that mathematicians, engineers, and visual artists started creating drawings using computers. They wrote algorithms that described a visual composition and had the computer execute them using a plotter drawing machine. Back then, what they did was called \u201ccomputer art.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Two drawings from the series P-10, “random walk” (1969) by Manfred Mohr exemplify the use of a computer program to generate endless visual compositions. Source: emohr.com<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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So the machine did everything? Where\u2019s the art in that?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The artists wrote the program and set the main instructions that the computer would follow, leaving some space for randomness, and then selected from the outputs of the plotter the compositions that fitted their vision. In digital art, artists often leave part of the control over the appearance or the behavior of the artwork to a computer program, realtime data, and even the viewers\u2019 actions. The machines and systems involved can play a more defining role than, say, a paintbrush or a chisel, but still it is the artist who creates the artwork.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The machines and systems involved in digital art can play a more defining role than a paintbrush or a chisel, but still it is the artist who creates the artwork.<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Wait, did you just say \u201cbehavior of the artwork\u201d? You mean that a digital artwork \u201cbehaves,\u201d like a person or a puppy?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Behavior is a way of saying that the artwork is active. It is not like a painting, a sculpture, or a photograph, which are the end result of a process previously carried out by the artist. Some digital artworks are generative, which means they can create new outputs endlessly, or they are interactive, which is to say that they react to what is in front of them, for instance the presence of a viewer. Also, some are connected to an external source of data, such as the weather forecast in Wyoming or the latest news from CNN. These artworks are not static, they do something. <\/em>They are constantly changing according to an algorithm, a storm approaching Cheyenne, or the movements of a person who just stepped into the room. Since they are doing something all the time, we can call the way they do it a behavior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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