digital art - digital art
What is digital visual art?
Digital art is a very young form of art that used to be found which used to be found almost exclusively on the Internet. With the advent of the first PCs in the 80s and 90s, equipped with appropriate graphics software that made painting and designing with the computer possible in the first place, the first attempts to use the computer as an artistic medium also began. And since art always seeks a performing stage, the Internet became a platform for digital art. A subculture very quickly emerged here, beyond the usual art channels. The variety and quality of the works shows a very wide range and there are many different terms in this context, such as: computer-generated art, computer art, computer graphics, cyber art, photopainting, digital art or simply digital art.
The artists themselves have started to name their works after the software they mainly work with. Similar to woodcuts, watercolors or lithography, there are photopaintings in digital art, 3D images, vector graphics, mathematical art and mixed media.
digital art - digital art
Pieces of music composed by computers, robots that paint, iPad drawings that are ultimately nothing more than piles of data: What does digitalization mean for art? Far more than just the need to rethink intellectual property and authorship. In the end, it will be about redefining art in a digitalized world independently of the uniqueness of a work - starting with Walter Benjamin.
Walter Benjamin's essay "The work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility" would probably also be suitable as a motto for the year. You could read any single sentence from the 80-year-old essay over breakfast and start the day with the feeling that you have perhaps understood the postmodern world a little better - and that you are prepared to endure it for several hours at a time. Benjamin wrote in 1935 about the increasingly dominant possibilities of the technical reproduction of art through forms such as photography (since the 1830s) and film (from 1900), which themselves became art forms.
He poses the inevitable question of how the potential of the fastest and best possible copy changes art itself and its perception. For him, the essence of a work of art lies above all in its "aura", which means nothing less than: its unique history and its physical uniqueness. "To follow a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the resting person while resting on a summer afternoon," writes Benjamin, "is to breathe the aura of these mountains, this branch."
the masses seeking diversion
Debates about "intellectual theft" or the legitimacy of streaming services were not yet taking place in those years. However, the potential of this development is already reflected in Benjamin's words: "Quantity has turned into quality: the much larger masses of participants have produced a different kind of participation." It is the old paradox: "the masses seek distraction", while "art demands collection from the viewer." For Benjamin, print was only a prefiguration of photography, photography only a prefiguration of film. But he had no idea where society might find itself almost 100 years later: overstimulated to the maximum, one could almost say cluttered, (almost) everything is immediately available everywhere, and especially this: Art.
With the technologies of the 19th and 20th centuries, the character of art itself has undoubtedly changed. Some of this art would therefore no longer have an "aura" in the Bejnaminian sense: films that can neither be experienced haptically nor are bound to a time and place of performance, or, much further still, digitally produced art: electronic music, digital photographs, pictures drawn on an iPad.
the opposite of free art?
The feature writer Georg Seeßlen even recognizes in the latter "advertising for the iPad, and definitely in a different sense than an oil painting is advertising for oil paints." In 2011, the magazine "konkret" published his essay "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner digitalen Verschleuderbarkeit" (The work of art in the age of its digital wastefulness), referring to Benjamin's thoughts. This form of "new digital art", writes Seeßlen, is "the opposite of free, uncontrolled, independent art".
On the one hand, software and hardware giants such as Apple earn money from the artists. Furthermore, this form of digital art is no longer the product of an autonomously acting individual, but is created in an "increasingly complicated process of dialog between man and machine" or "between digital structure, machine and human body (software, hardware & wetware)." This "amount of data", which the resulting artworks ultimately are, is by definition not an "original". Instead, the "aura" consists of the mobility of the art itself: It "arises from the fact that it appears where it shouldn't actually be. Or even through its disappearance." It loses its aura the moment you want to "have" it. Like a ghost, which is only a ghost if you can't grasp it.
digital music, digital improvisation
In 2011, Seeßlen already addressed the topic of "robot art", in which robots either create art themselves or become art in themselves. However, the first song composed by an artificial intelligence was not released until five years later - an annoying song full of incoherent patterns and without any inner musical dramaturgy. A negative example. However, composers such as the Parisian Philippe Manoury make targeted use of artificial intelligence because, as Manoury suggests in an interview, it is both more predictable than human improvisation and no less surprising: when people improvise, it is "usually either chaotic or too simple" for what Manoury has in mind. With a computer, however, the style in which it improvises is programmable, and at the same time, says the composer, "I never know exactly what will really come out in the end."
Uniqueness is not a criterion for art - it is also questionable whether it ever was (after all, not everything that is unique is therefore a work of art). The print of Van Gogh's Starry Night or the recording of a symphony by Gustav Mahler do not take away the quality and artistic status of the original or the concert experience, let alone the score.
Music is perhaps the key to an understanding of art in which even digital works of art are not simply piles of pixels: Because a score does not sound. To make music tangible, you need a place, a time and, within these, the interpretation. The latter is always unique, full of individual decisions, influences and conditions. The "aura" of a piece of music is therefore never given to it from the outset, but is only created at the moment it is played.
the relationship between art and transience
Thus, digital art also has its "appearances" within the framework of potentially all existing devices - the omnipresence is not something that makes it worthless, but an essential part of its concept. Where it appears, it appears completely new. It fluctuates like a baroque suite, a pop song, a fantasy for orchestra composed the day before yesterday - within the framework of its respective contexts of appearance and staging. This means that "reproducibility" or even "squanderability" is no longer an issue - because this art eludes the category of transience used for these terms.
Artists no longer act to counter the passing of time with something lasting, which thereby acquires history and "aura". Music can always be made and a recording can be reproduced. But an interpretation, that which turns the notated black dots into art, can never be reproduced. The artistic potential of the work is eternal, its creation unique each time. "Finitude" is therefore a concept without content, even in a digital world. Since man himself is not immortal, he is in the process of developing a digital existence that (theoretically) defies eternity on his behalf. The digital is the score, and digital art is its interpretation.
digital art - digital art
digital art
Digital art (digital art | digital visual art) is classified as media art. The term media art refers to artistic work that makes use of media that mainly emerged in the 20th/21st century, such as film, videos, holography, the Internet, computers, cell phones, games, etc. New media are carriers, mediators or working materials in art.
digital art - digital art
Some overlapping terms are used in connection with digital art: All artistic works and pieces that contain functioning analog or digital electronics can be called electronic art, whether in art genres such as architecture, performance, dance, sculpture and music, or in new areas such as robotics or computer animation.
computer art
Computer art was initially a collective term for all art produced with a computer in a central function. Digital art (digital art | digital image art) is based on digitally coded information. The information is usually processed digitally using computers and presented in an artistically usable form. Many forms of digital art are characterized by the difference between the purely digital work, the binary files, and their audible and visible representation. If works exist in digitally coded and stored form, for example as image files, sound files, algorithms, hypertexts, executable programs or code for websites, we can speak of digital art in the narrower sense. In certain cases, the files and digital processes are even the actual work of art.
computer-generated art
Computer-generated art is created on the basis of traditional art genres and art forms using the computer as a tool. Formerly analog areas of visual art such as printing, painting and photography are being continued digitally. Similarly, works of art in the field of moving images, video and film and the transmission media of radio and television are increasingly being produced digitally, following conventions from the analog tradition of media art.
digital visual art
Differentiations digital visual art
Digital painting: Created directly using input devices such as a graphics tablet or mouse, sometimes manipulated using algorithms to achieve effects that sometimes resemble traditional painting techniques.
Photomanipulation: Images and photomontages created by integrating or distorting digital content (photographs).
Mathematical art: Image output through mathematical algorithms, part of generative art Fractals as parameterization of fixed formulas, e.g. Mandelbrot set Vector Art: Art with vector graphics.
Digital style art: Digitally created imitation and continuation of traditional art styles, e.g. digital impressionist, digital abstract.
Mixed Media: Mixed forms of the above techniques.
Computer art: Computer art as digital visual art that focuses on the computer itself and the way it works
digital art - digital art
photo painting
what is photo painting?
Photo painting is a digital art form of the 21st century. A photo painting usually begins with a monothematic digital image. Using image editing software, the effective creative work begins step by step on numerous levels. The artist intuitively changes, deforms, twists and breaks the basic structures of the source motif - and places it in a completely new environment through skillful color and structural compositions - and thus in a completely new light. The fascinating thing for both artist and viewer is ultimately the different perception of the basic motif with the same energy still vibrating in the background: a familiar message with new information.
fractal
mandelbrot fractal
In 1975, Benoit Mandelbrot created the term fractal, which he derived from the Latin word fractus (broken). From then on, Mandelbrot referred to all objects that are self-similar to themselves on different size scales as fractals. A cauliflower, for example, illustrates what this means. If you look at a part of the cauliflower, the smaller structures there look the same as the whole cabbage. The surface of the cauliflower is therefore similar to itself and thus a fractal.
In mathematics, amazingly simple formulas can be used to generate fascinatingly aesthetic-looking fractals. The so-called Mandelbrot set - also known as the apple man - became particularly famous.
studio visit
visit me
My studio is available for a spontaneous visit or an appointment by appointmentopen. Come in, view my works, see my interpretation of digital art, ask about the latest works or look over my shoulder as I work. I look forward to your visit! Registration under +41 (0)44 787 61 66 or by email.
digitalgut ag
Seestrasse 205
CH-8806 Bäch
exhibitions | festivals
ars electronica
Ars Electronica is one of the world's top addresses for media art. At the festival, you will meet the who's who of the international media art scene as well as young shooting stars who are just starting to make a name for themselves. You can see their outstanding artistic works in numerous exhibitions, which attract a great deal of attention every year.
Ars Electronica Center
Ars-Electronica-Strasse 1
4040 Linz, Austria
museum of digital art
The small Zurich Museum of Digital Art is dedicated to the programmed links between algorithms, data and society.
What is digital art? There are many different ways to define digital art. Our definition is simple, digital art is the art of numbers. Digit = number. That's why there are not only screens and projections to be seen at MuDA. On the contrary, there are often entire exhibitions without computers. But always based on numbers and rules, poetic and appealing to all the senses. Sensual, programmed art.
Museum of Digital Art
Pfingstweidstr. 101
8005 Zurich, Switzerland
HeK
house of electronic arts
The HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel) is the Swiss competence center that deals with all art forms that express themselves through and reflect new technologies and media. With its interdisciplinary orientation, the HeK provides a broad public with insights into art productions of different genres in the interaction between art, media and technology.
House of Electronic Arts Basel
Freilager-Platz 9
4142Münchenstein/Basel, Switzerland