Art Gurus

The question, "Where do you get an art education these days?"
pops up on the screen of this studio computer so frequently
that I sometimes think that it's some sort of spam. "Struggle
at home with the help of books," is often my cryptic reply.
Some believe only a higher education will do--and they tell me
why, and why nothing will stop them. But I'm generally visited
by folks who want to learn stuff fast and to get on with it. I
often advise them to take workshops.

At the heart of workshops are authoritative, working
professionals--the "art gurus" who have a sideline of sharing
their moxie. The modestly named "Great American Art Event" is
such a venue. Presented by the Pearl Paint people, it happens
in New York each fall. Pretty well every type of art guru is
available at this one. Students can pick and choose from
top-tier instructors who specialize in painting animals,
abstracts, actresses, aircraft, etc., etc. Techniques and
processes can be sponged up, tried out and accepted or
rejected. "Tell me and I'll forget--show me and I'll learn," is
the modus operandi. Hands-on is where it's at. Bring your
easel.

In my own modest guruhood, I've noted and admired a certain
type of workshop student. They are people who already
understand the nature of our game. They know that private
individualism is the key, but they also know that a little
voyeurism is okay. Young or old, they are curious, focused,
eager, and happy to be challenged. They pop in and pop
out--often never to be seen again except when you hear about
their openings or their own inspiring workshops. Their initial
knowledge may be puny, but their intuition is grand. For them,
learning is a matter of finding out what they already know.
Among these folks, I've seen sly smiles as if they happened on
the keys to Fort Knox.

In the guruology department, personalities are as wild and
different as in any decent asylum. Some talk more than do.
Others talk by doing. Some can't talk very well at all. Some
will come around behind you and grab your brush. Others
wouldn't think of the effrontery. Apart from the tips that the
good gurus give, there's the exemplary wisdom that "it can be
done." Over and over I've heard it said that during a workshop
a door was opened and possibilities were newly seen. When the
"Great Goddess of Art" is so blessed, it makes a guru proud.

Best regards,

Robert

PS: A few years ago, while in Thailand, I spent a day with a
monk. One of the prayers that he repeated several times went
like this: "The Buddha said: 'Monk, you and you alone are your
refuge. You and you alone are your pathway.'" In the saffron
robes of my own guruness I say something similar: "Artist, gain
knowledge, but know that the greatest guru of all is the guru
within."

Esoterica: Perceived masters can be intimidating. They may even
cause a novice to give up because there's "too much to learn."
Sensitive instructors are able to draw you in and put your
creativity ahead of their own. Just in case, you must walk in
with your integrity firmly in hand. Open, yes, but full of your
own chutzpah. Last year at a workshop a woman picked up her
brush, pointed it at me, and said: "Don't talk to me Mr. Genn,
just go about your business with the other painters." For two
days her fingers never stopped moving. I couldn't help noticing
her ears growing larger.

Current clickback: If you would like to see selected,
illustrated responses to the last letter, "Perspective," please
go to: http://www.painterskeys.com/clickbacks/perspective.asp

Profiles of the art gurus for this year's "Great American Art
Event" are at:
http://www.greatamericanartevent.com/instructors.htm

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If you would like to comment or add your own opinions,
information or observations, please do so. Just click "reply"
on this letter or write rgenn@saraphina.com

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The Fractal Art Manifesto

© 1999 Kerry Mitchell
As a genre, Fractal Art (FA) has been around for approximately 15-20 years. Its first major public display may be considered to be an article about the Mandelbrot Set published in "Scientific American" in 1985. Since then, many advances have been made, both in fractal rendering capabilities and in the understanding of fractal geometery. Perhaps now is an opportune time to make a defining statement about what is (and what is not) Fractal Art.

Fractal Art is a genre concerned with fractals—shapes or sets characterized by self affinity (small portions of the image resemble the overall shape) and an infinite amount of detail, at all scales. Fractals are typically created on a digital computer, using an iterative numerical process. Lately, images that are not technically fractals, but that share the same basic generating technique and environment, have been welcomed into the FA world.

Fractal Art is a subclass of two dimensional visual art, and is in many respects similar to photography—another art form which was greeted by skepticism upon its arrival. Fractal images typically are manifested as prints, bringing Fractal Artists into the company of painters, photographers, and printmakers. Fractals exist natively as electronic images. This is a format that traditional visual artists are quickly embracing, bringing them into FA's digital realm.

Generating fractals can be an artistic endeavor, a mathematical pursuit, or just a soothing diversion. However, FA is clearly distinguished from other digital activities by what it is, and by what it is not.

Fractal Art is not:
Computer(ized) Art, in the sense that the computer does all the work. The work is executed on a computer, but only at the direction of the artist. Turn a computer on and leave it alone for an hour. When you come back, no art will have been generated.
Random, in the sense of stochastic, or lacking any rules. Being based on mathematics, fractal rendering is the essence of determinism. Apply the same image generation steps, and the same result will follow. Slight changes in process usually lead to slight changes in product, making FA an activity which can be learned, not a haphazard process of pushing buttons and turning knobs.
Random, in the sense of unpredictable. Fractal Art, like any new pursuit, will have aspects unknown to the novice, but familiar to the master. Through experience and education, the techniques of FA can be learned. As in painting or chess, the essentials are quickly grasped, although they can take a lifetime to fully understand and control. Over time, the joy of serendipitous discovery is replaced by the joy of self-determined creation.
Something that anyone with a computer can do well. Anyone can pick up a camera and take a snapshot. However, not just anyone can be an Ansel Adams or an Annie Liebovitz. Anyone can take brush in hand and paint. However, not just anyone can be a Georgia O'Keeffe or a Pablo Picasso. Indeed, anyone with a computer can create fractal images, but not just anyone will excel at creating Fractal Art.
Fractal Art is:
Expressive. Through a painter's colors, a photographer's use of light and shadow, or a dancer's movements, artists learn to express and evoke all manner of ideas and emotions. Fractal Artists are no less capable of using their medium as a similarly expressive language, as they are equipped with all the essential tools of the traditional visual artist.
Creative. The final fractal image must be created, just as the photograph or the painting. It can be created as a representational work, and abstraction of the basic fractal form, or as a nonrepresentational piece. The Fractal Artist begins with a blank "canvas", and creates an image, bringing together the same basic elements of color, composition, balance, etc., used by the traditional visual artist.
Requiring of input, effort, and intelligence. The Fractal Artist must direct the assembly of the calculation formulas, mappings, coloring schemes, palettes, and their requisite parameters. Each and every element can and will be tweaked, adjusted, aligned, and re-tweaked in the effort to find the right combination. The freedom to manipulate all these facets of a fractal image brings with it the obligation to understand their use and their effects. This understanding requires intelligence and thoughtfulness from the Artist.
Most of all, Fractal Art is simply that which is created by Fractal Artists: ART.

A man and his dog

A man and his dog were walking along a road. The man was enjoying the
scenery, when it suddenly occurred to him that he was dead.
He remembered dying, and that the dog walking beside him had been dead for
years. He wondered where the road was leading them.
After a while, they came to a high, white stone wall along one side of the
road. It looked like fine marble. At the top of a long hill, it was broken
by a tall arch that glowed in the sunlight.

When he was standing before it he saw a magnificent gate in the arch that
looked like mother-of-pearl, and the street that led to the gate looked
like pure gold. He and the dog walked toward the gate, and as he got closer,
he saw a man at a desk to one side.
When he was close enough, he called out, "Excuse me, where are we?"
"This is Heaven, sir," the man answered.
"Wow! Would you happen to have some water?" the man asked.
"Of course, sir. Come right in, and I'll have some ice water brought right
up."
The man gestured, and the gate began to open.
"Can my friend," gesturing toward his dog, "come in, too?" the traveler
asked.
"I'm sorry, sir, but we don't accept pets."


The man thought a moment and then turned back toward the road and continued
the way he had been going with his dog.

After another long walk, and at the top of another long hill, he came to a
dirt road leading through a farm gate that looked as if it had never been
closed. There was no fence.

As he approached the gate, he saw a man inside, leaning against a tree and
reading a book.
"Excuse me!" he called to the man. "Do you have any water?"
"Yeah, sure, there's a pump over there, come on in."
"How about my friend here?" the traveler gestured to the dog.
"There should be a bowl by the pump."
They went through the gate, and sure enough, there was an old-fashioned
hand pump with a bowl beside it.
The traveler filled the water bowl and took a long drink himself, then he
gave some to the dog.
When they were full, he and the dog walked back toward the man who was
standing by the tree.
"What do you call this place?" the traveler asked.
"This is Heaven," he answered.
"Well, that's confusing," the traveler said. "The man down the road said that was Heaven, too."
"Oh, you mean the place with the gold street and pearly gates? Nope. That's
hell."
"Doesn't it make you mad for them to use your name like that?"
"No, we're just happy that they screen out the folks who would leave their
best friends behind."

Toward a Digital Aesthetic

Toward a Digital Aesthetic
Introduction: The Transparent Revolution

What does digital art look like? Confounding this slippery topic is the chameleon-like ability of digital art to simulate to a very high degree the appearance of many traditional media and genre. In addition, certain commonly held beliefs, some of which are in direct opposition to one another, add to the camouflage, hiding from our awareness the actual scope of current digital art. For example, one idea, based on digital imagery made nearly a generation ago, holds that computer art is boxy and pixilated with sharp vertical and horizontal lines and jagged diagonals, that the colors are uncontrolled and super saturated, and that the predominate forms hinge on infinite swirling repetitions. Oddly enough this idea survives and stands today in spite of a converse belief that digital art serves mainly to create seamless realistic environments and characters that are indistinguishable from photographic reality. These incomplete and limiting views blind us to the fluidity and expressive potentials of digital imagery.

There is also a belief that making digital art is an automated pastime requiring no more knowledge or artistic input than punching the “art” button. This beach-comber model for sitting back while the computer does all the work, then simply choosing the best shell on the beach, is a misconception born out of computer phobia. If taken to its logical extreme, the most insidious aspect of this misinformed belief would stifle exploration of the unique and fresh imagery generated directly from the digital system. To ignore this potential and not utilize imagery that resides inside the digital matrix itself would be a serious artistic loss.

Digital art making tools serve many masters in and outside the visual arts. As with a paintbrush, the computer can be put to use expressing many divergent genres, styles and “isms” within the field of 2D visual art. To nail down a specific aesthetic for, so called, “digital art” which holds common ground for all its expressive potential would seem a daunting, perhaps, superfluous task. But, computer art has been with us now for over twenty-five years to the point that a majority of the images flooding our senses each day through a number of different media are created digitally. These new art making tools have revolutionized commercial art, photography, television, music and film and, as such, the term “digital art” is spread so thinly across so many artistic endeavors to be, as an art movement, virtually transparent. However, as artists, who employ digital tools, make inroads into the world of fine arts it has become time for some serious consideration of what this art has to offer. What separates it from what has been and what are the characteristics that will determine what digital art brings to the unfolding contemporary art scene and the continuing history of artistic expression?

The Death of Styles

While artists are often inspired to innovate by exploring a technique, a philosophy or a new tool, rarely do they set out to create a new style. Recognition of a style has more to do with the critics, galleries and academicians that struggle, after the fact, to ascribe words, labels, context and a re-sale price to the artist's work. All well and good, until the drive to innovate a new style becomes a major criterion for evaluating the relative worth of any particular work of art. Or, until a whole art form is proclaimed "dead" by virtue of an apparent inability to perform adequately on the stage of stylistic innovation. Then, we must question if, rather than the art being dead, perhaps it is the person looking at the art that has succumbed. And, since new styles and art movements are the purview of the critic, we might proclaim it is the critic and not the artist that has failed to create something “new and improved”.

Today’s art world is so saturated with styles accumulated over the last 600 years of art making that we might have to consider things have run their course--stylistically. Looking at the range of art available, all of which, regardless of the creative tools employed, can be pigeonholed neatly into this “ism” or that; we may have to consider that the "style-makers" have created a sufficient number of broadly defined styles to fit all occasions and visual statements. So that, with a good degree of jaded security, one can say, "I've seen that…we've been there."

Consider for a moment that art commentary and marketing based on creating stylistic trends has died. Perhaps we have entered an era where art is no longer a matter of this or that style; but is instead a strong, thick and murky brew of people and tools and diverse expression--an open field of creativity. From this point of view, style is just another tool of expression. And, since art is not about the tools used to make it, art criticism can no longer be an evaluation based on the newness of a style or the creation of a, heretofore, unseen genre. Instead of a dead-end, I see a great "jumping-off-point" wherein the strength and worth of a visual statement can be evaluated based on one's skill to manipulate line, composition, color, form, rhythm; plus an artist’s sensitivity in selecting, manipulating or synthesizing divergent visual styles to create a particular work of art. It is also significant that a movement toward creating art digitally thrives outside what appears to be a stalled “Fine Arts” scene. The mix of people creating their art this way is incredibly diverse, with artists from all over the world looking over each other’s shoulder even as the art is made. Perhaps the most important thing about current digital art is not how it looks, but who is making it and why.

In his book, "The Art Spirit" Robert Henri states, "...there is the new movement. There always has been the new movement and there always will be the new movement. It is necessary to pierce to the core to get at the value of a movement and not be confused by its sensational exterior." So, while digital tools may or may not be used to produce a transformative visual style there is a deeper question regarding the emergence of an overriding digital aesthetic that speaks to our contemporary culture, as well as, our art.

Tracing the Legacy of Pop Art

An aesthetic is not as much about the appearance of the artwork as it is the complex networks of perceptual, presentational and even political rules that determine the strength and relevance of an artistic statement. In this regard, an aesthetic acts as the filter or context through which specific work is seen to be necessary in its making and through its practice should offer a means by which we expand our perception of what art can be. A new aesthetic requires and is always somewhat based on what has come before. In this respect, an examination of Pop Art reveals some important foundations for an underlying aesthetic of today’s two-dimensional digital art.

Pop Art, itself, grew out of a reaction against “Abstract Expressionism” which had become the darling of the American art scene, as well as, an important cold war cultural export through the late 40’s and early 50’s. By the end of the 50’s, “Abstract Expressionism” had served the purpose of incorporating the metaphysics of American Romanticism into a modern style. But, artists were looking to return, in some way, to the real world. The real world they chose, however, was not that of nature but rather the post war mechanized and mediated world of mass communication, mass production and mass consumption.

Located at a safe, yet observable, distance from the juggernaut of American post war mass production and spiraling consumption, a group of English artists recognized in the U.S. a vast forest of signs and symbols indicating the rise of a new form of mass culture. The idea of using imagery from mass media and commerce to comment on cultural and sociological concerns revolving around potential dehumanization through the joined forces of technology and the unprecedented consumption of a popular mass culture, combined with a visual aesthetic that harkened back to pre-war Surrealism and Dadaism, laid the groundwork for Pop Art.

After receiving its start in England, Pop Art took root in the U.S. during the 60’s. The American art scene, which had witnessed early indications of “Proto-Pop” works from Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, Stuart Davis, Joseph Cornell (among others), proved to be Pop Art’s most fertile environment. An important factor in the success of Pop Art, following the triumph of Abstraction, has to be that Pop Art represented the first return, since Surrealism and Dada, to full blown depictive art. The presentation of recognizable things was back. And, while European Pop remained grounded in social comment, American Pop artists, perhaps in a further attempt to distance them from abstraction, maintained that the imagery used was based on detached, even random selection and a purposeful attempt to remove artistic expression from the work.

Whether or not the work was truly successful in this venture, Pop Art did evolve an aesthetic featuring the following broad factors: (1) The use of images borrowed from advertising, photography, comic strips, and other mass media sources which had already been processed into two dimensional, flat imagery. (2) An objective and detached attitude toward appropriation of previous styles of art, allowing for even divergent styles to be expressed in a single work. (3) Mass media images were often combined with areas of flat unmixed colors, bound by hard edges into frontal and mostly centric compositions which did not reveal the handiwork of the artist in the form of textured or expressive brush strokes. (4) This sleek and unaffected appearance, suggesting the depersonalization of mass production, allowed mechanical processes to gain acceptance in the making of fine art. (5) Much of the work exhibited an unapologetic decorativeness and delved into areas of popular taste and kitsch that, along with commercial art production techniques, had also been consider outside the limits of Fine Art. (6) The use of readymade image sources drawn from current media naturally tied Pop Art into contemporary subject matter fostering the feel of avante gardism. (7) Pop Art employed and stimulated to new levels of acceptance the use of printmaking in order to collage images and as a means to democratize collecting of art by the masses. The later point backfired somewhat when the popularity of the prints soared. Subsequently, market dynamics managed to keep the price of this work too high for most of the masses. But, even this miscalculation was offset somewhat by a booming business for poster art among young collectors of the period between the 60’s through the mid 70’s.

In keeping with the vagaries of popular culture, by the early 70’s Pop Art seemed to have run its course. To its credit, as a series of ideas and strategies open to constant redefinition, Pop Art has continued to influence subsequent generations of art making. Hardly, any of the genres of work following Pop Art, such as Minimalism, Op Art, Photo-Realism, Installation, Conceptual, Environmental/Earth Works, Video Art and such, would have been possible without borrowing some aspects of the Pop Art aesthetic. Pop Art provides, here at the turn of the century, the basic structure supporting the formation of a Digital Art aesthetic. Mindful of the ubiquitous nature of the computer to serve the ends of any number of established styles, genres and historical movements, the challenge before us is to describe how digital art pushes beyond its Pop Art framework to arrive at something unique and powerful in contemporary life and art.

Toward a Digital Aesthetic

Let us begin with a look at how digital art accommodates and ultimately expands upon the seven broad tenants of Pop Art previously described:

(1) “The use of images borrowed from advertising…”

Digital technology has ushered in a new era for the acquisition and integration of widely divergent material, whether visual, aural or text. A key factor in work employing digital technology involves the digitization of a wide range of inputs into the common material of binary information. Today it is possible for the visual artist, writer, designer, filmmaker, and musician to sit down before, essentially, the same device to manipulate this common material in order to produce work. The fact that even certain processes such as, selecting, copying, pasting, running filters are now common practices for all these, heretofore, individual crafts is just the tip of a highly integrative and creative synthesis of forms.

In addition, digital technology represents not only a tool for mixing art of various forms it is also a new form of mass communication. In this respect the tool itself is an integral part of a global mediated environment from which artists can draw inspiration, as well as, source material. The fluidity of a visual image in this techno/social environment is unprecedented and far exceeds the potentials suggested in the Pop aesthetic.

(2) “An objective and detached attitude toward appropriation of traditional styles…”

The post-modern notion of appropriation, which meshes with the enhanced ability for digital tools to acquire and reshape all kinds of experience into a common material, carries over into an attitude toward established genre of artistic styles. Using digital imaging software, designed in many cases to mimic the marks of numerous types of traditional media, many artists now explore expressing an image, as it would appear in several different media and styles. This mixing together of divergent media and styles of expression is greatly enhanced by numerous digital processes involving saving multiple versions of an image during its production and the ability to draw upon these versions to create a master image that is a synthesis of each version. Unfettered exploration of style, media and composition takes hold when a digital artist understands the freedom resulting from being released from the accumulated preciousness of one’s work. This preciousness is enforced by the cost of expended material and, as the work approaches completion, the built up anxiety toward ruining many hours of work by following an artistic experiment that might not easily be undone. Digital art, for the most part, does not suffer from this damper on creativity.

(3) “Often these images…did not reveal the handiwork of the artist…”

While there is no common look to the art being made, every digital artist has to share two basic modes of display. That is, the work can be expressed on a monitor or as a digital print. Since the original work occurs and resides in the digital matrix of computer memory and storage systems, this “original” is essentially immaterial and virtually non-existent until expressed in either of these two forms. Due to its infinitely reproducible binary nature and the fact that some form of reproduction or expression is required to materialize the original into any visible form, digital art is simultaneously an original and a reproduction.

Digital Art is truly and unashamedly the art of illusion. The expressive nature of the artist’s imagery belies the fact that either of the two basic modes of display offer a flat mechanized image largely unaffected by changes in ambient light conditions and absent of truly tactile texture. The line between detached mechanical production and expressive, handcrafted artistry is blurred to the extreme in digital art, because it is, in fact, both. And, whereas Pop Art used a similar flat, non-expressive representation to reflect on depersonalization in a consumer culture, Digital Art represents a return to artistic passions in a culture where expressive appearance is valued over material truth. In a sense, Pop Art dealt with ideas observed in a culture of commerce and mass communication while Digital Art springs forth from the artists that are now living in the unfolding results of that culture.

(4) “This sleek and unaffected appearance…allowed mechanical processes to gain acceptance…”

Many art lovers have embraced the various technologies of lithography, screen-printing, photography, film and video as a means toward making fine art. Digital Art, however, by employing the darling of our current technology finds itself in conflict with two cultural beliefs that Pop Art was apparently not able to eliminate. One is the belief that art ought to be hard to make and the longer an artist toils on a particular piece the more valuable the art becomes. The other concept our culture wants to believe is that its current technology is virtually perfect in materializing the dream of eliminating errors and relieving human drudgery. Thus digital artists squirm under the conundrum of making something our culture believes should be difficult and labor intensive while employing our premiere technology which has been designed and sold to make all things easy and labor free. We still have a cultural love/hate relationship with our art and our technology. Digital Art simply finds itself inextricably at the center of these deep seated and passionately held cultural beliefs, offering proof that neither belief is, nor ever was, thoroughly correct.

(5) “Much of the work…delved into areas of popular taste…considered outside the limits of Fine Arts.”

The question of what is inside or outside the limits of Fine Arts is always a lively issue. Certainly one of the most vital and important aspects of Digital Art is that the tens of thousands of artists working world wide with these new tools remain, for the most part, off the Fine Arts radar. Thus representing a new and fertile source of largely unaffected art making, capable of being exhibited and discussed instantly world wide without the intervention of traditional museums and galleries. Digital Art does not need Fine Art. This lends Digital Art the air of being a populist movement, with a large potential for democratizing art making. Digital Art stands to further blur the line between high and low art, enriching both camps in the process.

For example, much of the Digital Art one sees grows from the tradition of Photography. Photography with its own long history as a populist image making technology, turned mass media device, turned Fine Art is both model and material for Digital Art. While augmenting and expanding traditional photography, Digital art has exploited photographic manipulation and synthesized a new form of collage art that often straddles the separation between high and low art.

A Brief Digression

The story begins in the dark under belly of New York city in the 1930s and ‘40s, where the blood soaked world of gangster violence, crime and suicide was brought to light by the camera of Weegee, the crime-scene paparazzo whose work ushered in the age of tabloid journalism. Lowbrow but highly lucrative, tabloid journalism soon spun off into its own publications and gritty photojournalism began to share space with photo-manipulation. It started innocently enough, Madame “X” and Mister “Y”, were an item of gossip (the great-grand-daddy of all Journalism), but no one had a picture of “X” and “Y” together. Why not cut and paste them together? Surely everyone would understand the context of two separate photos, pictured together. Not a lie exactly but, “you get the picture”.

In a short time, there was found to be something equally as compelling behind photo-hoaxes as there was actual photos. The context for these photo-manipulations required a sense of humor but also played on the shock of seeing the impossible in a photograph. It’s not that we believe what we see, rather it is that a photograph, one of our trusted senses for cultural reality, has been altered; a point of reference distorted and put to use somewhere outside the truth. Tabloid Culture photography, if not real, is then Surreal and capable of opening up the whole body of photographic reality to examination.

And, proudly serving this imaginary news since the early 1980’s, that wonderful light bending mechanism, the computer. Of course, page lay out, pre-press proofing, enhanced typography also played a role in making the computer the tool of choice in commercial art and design. But, the manipulation of photos and the ability to collage elements collected from many image sources into a cohesive and believable composite is also unsurpassed with digital tools. Today, digital art based on this ability to manipulate photos and collage elements is the most prevalent type of imagery likely to emerge from art website or gallery exhibition. But, there is something else that has carried over and prevails in much of this work and that is the dark and somewhat creepy subject matter; the Tabloid’s low culture legacy turned toward high art.

In current Digital Art we find a range of this work, some with classical overtones as with Alessandro Bavari, especially in his, “Sodom and Gomorra: a reportage from the lost cities”, suite. Alessandro works particularly hard in his art to soften what he refers to as the “crudity” of photography. According to Alessandro, “to distance the viewer from the fierce crudity of the photograph, I use a technique of layering “patinas”, the same technique used in oil painting with glazing in which transparent layers lend distance to the image.” The “hyper-realism” of the photograph is blended back into other environmental elements, some of which Bavari creates in 3D software, to compose images with strange and allegorical connotations reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch and Giotto.

In the work of two Australian artists, Shannon Hourigan and Steve Danzig, the harsh reality of photography is exploited rather than pushed back. Both artists rest the sensibilities for their work in modern cultural concerns. Shannon recognizing the “politics and interpretations attributable to photography” focuses her work “in exploration of the horror and beauty of the female body as an object or mechanism of violence”. Her images often evoking distortions and defacement remain on the whole realistic representations, while Steve Danzig pushes the photos of his models into compositions that are abstractions of recognizable human content. He states about his work “the photographic source penetrates deep into our psyche and questions nature and reality through the wizardry of technology. We are ‘techo-junkies’ in our daily digestion of ‘reality marketing’ as presented in all media programmingwe want a REAL experience within a very surreal situation…” “The realism of a photographic image becomes a reflection of our voyeuristic nature to project ourselves into a sense of realism or fantasy within the image.”

Yes, to all…but why the gothic blackness, the grotesques? I found some good answers in the work of Robert Brown, whose collage and photo-manipulations stand squarely and unabashedly within popular culture. He says, “The reality of our world is filled with chaos and weirdness and shock and violence and sex and a whirl wind of information that is undecipherable…” “I try to place my work smack dab in the eye of the storm where it is calm but where the ruble is flying around me so I can examine it.” “The power of photography is based in reality, this acknowledgement holds power beyond the skill of the artist. When a painter paints a morphed, distorted figure, he has created a new world. When I morph and distort a photograph of a figure, I am rearranging the REAL world, which is very upsetting. Messing with reality is frightening to people. I think that is why so much photo manipulation out there is dark and disturbing. Mutilating photographic forms into something spooky is very easy. The trick is to pull beyond simple grotesques. However, after all my work I must say that I don’t believe it’s possible to do extremely advanced manipulations of photographs and not have an element of foreboding in the work.”

One thing is certain, traditional photography froze time and people and places. What was done when the shutter snapped shut was, for the most part, done. Digital Art has freed photography from its own finality and in doing so has pointed out the fluid nature of the ways in which we have come to perceive modern realities. In the hands of a digital artist a photograph is just the beginning, neither real nor unreal. As to the question of what is high and what is low in the arts, Brown states, “The word ‘high’ suggests trying to elevate something above normal reality, out of the mundane. But under closer inspection, the mundane is not mundane at all. ‘Low art or people’s art’ is an attempt to grapple with what is around us.” An undeniable part of our culture is now the computer and the effect its processes are to have on our realities, as well as, our art.

Let’s continue with the last two factors from the Pop Art aesthetic and see where that leads:

(6) The use of readymade images sources…tied Pop Art into contemporary subject matter fostering the feel of avante gardism.”

Computers are contemporary subject matter. Computers are also the medium for contemporary cultural communication. Our culture’s “avante garde” is quite noticeably engaged in proliferating computer use in all endeavors. As you read this, you are forming the digital aesthetic. How’s that for current?

(7) “Pop Art employed and stimulated to new levels of acceptance the use of printmaking in order to collage images and as a means to democratize collecting of art by the masses.”

Digital tools have brought the art of Collage to a much higher level than has ever been possible. The appropriated image itself can now be cut and pasted, as well as, tinted, reversed, repeated, inverted, resized, made transparent, blended and stacked into visually interactive layers. Pop Art adopted hand held screen-printing, at first, as a method for gaining some photographic control over an acquired image. That is, by making a silk screen of an image, that image could be enlarged, reversed, positioned and repeated within a composition. And, although a mechanical process, it was also the means by which a lot of “expressive” errors found their way into the work. These errors being in a sense the last evidence of the artist’s hand in the process. Digital tools have further erased most of these errors and precise, seamless, powerful collages are the result. And, when this work is viewed through the “once-removed” patina of the digital display modes the integrative process of Collage is complete.

Pop Art enlivened the printmaking business and since printing is one of only two ways in which digital art is visualized; two-dimensional digital art is essentially a printmaker’s art. Prints are the chief means by which the digital artist can materialize imagery into a physical commodity and, in turn, access their most viable market. Richly colored, long lasting, affordably priced, digital art prints stand poised to, once again, enrich and enliven a print market.

So, the Pop Art aesthetic is how Digital Art gets its foot in the door. But, beyond the scope of Pop Art, there are other issues and capabilities important to the formation of the Digital Aesthetic.

Beyond the Drawing Board

Digital Art has no claim to the origins of visual complexity. Many other art forms have demonstrated deep levels of complex imagery. But, imagine the most complex pattern or design you have ever seen; now copy that image reverse and rotate it 180 degrees and superimpose it over the original (repeat as necessary). The techniques for making digital art provide a means by which patterns of immense complexity can be objectified without being frozen into a material state, thereby allowing the most complex work to remain as malleable as an idea. The effect of working in this mode is to grab hold of a thought, express it, examine it, modify it and then integrate what normally was fleeting fancy into finished work.

Indicative of this fluidity are the issues that arise from the ephemeral nature of the digital original, which is not present in any recognizable manner. The notion of owning an “original”, which cannot be enjoyed without first being materialized by secondary means, removes the digital original to a place beyond the slight object-hood of a photographic negative. If ten people on the world-wide-web are looking at the same image on a web site, which screen has the original? The same might be asked of a print of that image. Where is the original? How much does it matter?

With digital technology the formal codification of “limited” print editions, developed mainly in the last century to affect market prices by artificially creating scarcity, are nearly pointless. Outside of maintaining accurate records of print production, the digital artist needs only limit an edition to the number sold. This, of course, raises some real issues with the traditional concerns for authenticity and ownership and yet, this too, only reflects the fluidity with which modern images are made and exist inside digital technology. Will our cultural definitions of such matters evolve to match the capabilities of this technology? They most certainly have to, as is evident in the music industry’s attempts to address and maintain its fortunes in the new fluidity of binary encoded art.

Also, tied closely to the digital workflow comes the enhanced capability to create and display serializations of work. The ability to save versions of an image as it evolves to a finished state, as well as, preserve all the experiments that one tries within a single composition demands display as a series of works, rather than a single image. This notion is evident in animated loops of digital imagery, as well as, mounted prints in a series. The concept that a digital image is never quite done and remains malleable and open to further and future iterations is an important factor in the way digital art is made displayed and marketed. When considered in conjunction with “sampling”, a production technique “cross-over” from digital music composition; an exhibition based on a single image sampled and re-configured by numerous artists into separate but related works is a natural extension of digital capabilities.

The Velocity of Imagination

Digital does have its drawbacks. Random effects that occur with natural media cannot be duplicated in digital without hard work, attention to detail and patience. Painters have used these random procedures for hundreds of years to add spontaneity and looseness to work, as well as, to open and tap into subconscious resources stimulated by surprises made by materials not necessarily under the artist's control. But, there are degrees to randomness, as well as, surprise. For example, when one splatters paint across a canvas, although the results are ultimately a random consequence of gravity, viscosity and absorption; the pattern is also recognizable and somewhat predictable. Sprinkling salt on wet watercolor has identifiably different results than stippling paint with a toothbrush, yet these actions are random and happen automatically without much artistic effort or exertion of control.

Within the digital aesthetic, filters and fractal generators designed to perform algorithmic image distortions or to apply pixels in specified patterns provide the sort of random actions that produce certain controllable and, yet, unpredictable results. By exploring and piling action upon action the digital system itself can present unexpected and beautiful results. As with splattered paint the resulting forms can suggest, to the artist's imagination, meaning; and even indicate further, more directed, additions to the developing composition. As the artist works back and forth between steering the process, then relinquishing control to the caprices of the tools and materials; a symbiotic dance between the maker and what is being made is formed and nurtured. This visual jam session gives rise to imagery that the artist could not have imagined without the spontaneous interface between the psyche, the artist's hand and the work as it evolves in the moment.

Digital technology greatly facilitates and expands upon this bond between human artist and image generating processes due mainly to the speed with which the technology can respond and show the results of, what a moment ago, was only contained in the mind. Making digital art in this fashion is very much like having a conversation with something infinitely deep and yet intimately personal. We now have a tool that works as fast as our imagination.

Outside the Box

The true measure of an aesthetic lies in its ability to find expression outside the surroundings in which it was created. The "chicken or the egg" relationship between an aesthetic and the culture from which it emerges suggests that wider issues and developments within a society occur simultaneously with new art. Traditionally, new movements in painting were echoed or often led by developments in poetry and literature. And, in modern times, music, film and theater have reflected and supported new aesthetics. The notion of an emerging Digital Aesthetic occurs upon noticing the mixture of acceptance and resistance that digital technology is fomenting in the music, film and fine art industry. "Sampling" and "downloading" music is seen as either creative liberation or theft. Photo-realistic 3D modeling and streaming high definition imagery expand the possibilities for filmmakers, while putting many traditional trades and distribution models in jeopardy. Some printmakers and even photographers are livid about having to share the term "print" with digital artists. These are among the many symptoms or signs of cultural changes wrought by digital tools. But, the digital aesthetic becomes particularly evident upon seeing what seem to be distinct digital influences emerging in the distinctly analog endeavor of Painting.

When I began to notice a digital character in significant numbers of current traditional paintings, the question I asked myself was; are these truly signs of a developing aesthetic or was I simply saying to myself, "I could do that on my computer"? In fact, many painters admit to designing their paintings first on a computer then transcribing this work to canvas and paint. However, rather than painters expressing the signs of a new aesthetic, often this is simply another case of painters adopting, as they have from the beginning, more efficient and accurate production techniques.

The evidence became clear when I ran across the work of painter, William J. Bitunjac, on display in issue #47 of "New American Paintings". Here is an excerpt from his artist's statement on page 21: "All my work begins at the computer, the driving technology behind our current vision of modern culture. Each painting is designed and executed in light and silicon, long before material form is allowed. The pixel, now almost universally understood as the primary element of computer generated graphics, is recorded in paint, cast out of plastic and cataloged by color. The artist's mark can no longer bear the weight of grace and violence, a burden placed on the author of each stroke by expressionism and gestural abstraction. Paint becomes a tool that can only construct an image. The artist becomes a worker, responsible for the construction of the designed object. The mark, the pixel, the tiny acrylic square of paint, has almost no recognizable origin. The designer produces an image, the computer and software interprets the image, the monitor/printer relates the image, and the artist only recreates, in mechanical fashion, what he is given. The production of the work becomes an algorithm, a system for proceeding."

Beyond using the computer to design work, it is evident that Bitunjac has, also, cast himself in the role of "the ghost in the machine"; reflecting his deep attention to the changing material and conceptual conditions of contemporary society as it transitions from an industrial culture to a culture that trades in information and the myriad of ways in which this information can be expressed. He is seeking answers to questions, such as, what does it mean to step into the role of the computer, to carry out a process along predetermined parameters? Where does the art happen, in the planning or the production? What is required to be "digital", a computer, a process, a primary element by which to construct--pixel or byte or brick of light? What are the unknown ideals we will absorb by involving one machine in the production of nearly everything in our culture?

By playing the role of both creative spark in the form of artist and designer then, later, performing as the human equivalent to computer software by single-mindedly following a pattern set forth by external non compassionate sources; Bitunjac explores the anonymity and de-humanization that takes place when the art making is directed by machine. Thus, his work represents this moment in our culture’s development when we find ourselves gaining control over a device that seems to have, only recently, rushed forward like an unexpected tide. In fact, we are just waking up to the materialized world of our technological dreams.

Bitunjac's work negates its digital origins by being manifested as paint and negates human expression and artistic intervention through the application of rigid, purposely inorganic production processes. These constructed paintings represent what Mr. Bitunjac refers to as a “symptom” of the “confusion and chaos and constant negation of preexisting relationships we feel in our current cultural climate”. Through work, which is a synthesis of digital and traditional painting, he asks that we examine our relationship to "a digital technology that we desperately admire specifically for the fact that it is not in any way human, knowing full well that for humanity to attain what we desire we must forsake our humanity, which we are unwilling to do."

What Does Digital Art Look Like?

The sum total of what has been discussed, so far, is to describe the manner by which a digital aesthetic has grown from and expanded upon traditional forms of photography, collage, and the making of marks either as in drawing or paint. We see that digital techniques suggest that a synthesis of many existing forms and genres is certain. We have examined the ephemeral nature of the digital original and the mechanized means by which the system’s visual output contains the passion and complexity of the artist’s original vision while maintaining an aloof and mediated component to the work’s authenticity and presence. As a device that has become important to modern culture, the computer represents both the material and the medium by which this culture examines and shapes itself. The cultural values which place appearance that “fools-the-eye” over issues of material and ownership are reflected in the overriding prevalence of mimicry and simulation in digital artwork. We have touched on the liveliness of an unaffected art, which has gained much and has much more to offer by virtue of its democratization. And, finally, beyond the Pop Art concerns for images borrowed from consumer culture and techo-depersonalization, the Digital Aesthetic stands as an example of artistic passions reanimated within and by the very device that many had promised would put an end to such things as passion, art and self expression.

What does Digital Art look like? For now, if the art raises questions as to whether it is a painting, print or photograph and the answer to all three inquiries is, "yes"; then its probably a piece created from within the emerging Digital Aesthetic.


Notes and sources for this essay

JD Jarvis
November, 2002
Las Cruces, NM

A Commentary

JD Jarvis, MOCA contributing editor,
distinguished digital art critic and artist

What do digital artists do: Photo, paint and print


Until the advent of digital art-making and print production, the terms, “photograph”, “painting” or “print” were easily and universally understood. But trying to adopt these terms to describe what a digital artist does is often confusing, at best, and actually inadequate, almost always. To “call it what it is” would require new terms that are cumbersome and mostly meaningless to the segment of the public that has a normal interest in art. So, we find ourselves in a sometimes contentious battle with our own sensibilities trying to describe what we do.

For example, if we really “call it what it is” we cannot use the word “original” in its established form. “Original”, that is, meaning “one-of-a-kind” and not referring to a “never seen before objet” as in the phrase “original thought”. The “original” digital image is barely an object at all, existing in a state of encoded information that cannot be seen without the aid of a viewing or imaging device. Any such viewing of the file is a real-time “production” of that image. NOTE: not a “reproduction” which is another kettle of fish, but rather a “production” or perhaps a “replication” of binary code into visual image. You can “print” this image (and we can go into why the term “print” does not really “call it what it is” some other time) and destroy the data file and this image on paper becomes “the only replication of the binary art file to ever exist”, but is it the “original”? It is most assuredly at that point a “one of-a-kind object” and could, possibly, benefit from this marketing cache. Of course, you could draw or paint on this “print” and contribute even more to the aura of its object-hood, thus making the piece a more traditional “mixed media” work.

We also refer to the source of a traditional print as a “matrix”, but the binary encoded digital original is far more than a negative, colorless impression of an image as is the etching plate or litho stone. Ironically, the digital original is so much more in terms of a complete piece of art and, at the same time; in terms of its physical presence, so much less than a traditional printable “matrix”.

Such irony abounds when media and techniques have outrun existing terminology. Just for fun…here is a brief comparison of some of the things we “call it” and actually, “what it is”:

Print………….…Micro airbrush rendering or inkjet replicant
Original…………Screen (CRT or LCD) replicant oriInkjet replicant
Paint…………....Digital freehand markings
Photography……Digital image capture and manipulation
Mixed Media…...Mixed software (unless, of course, you mix your micro airbrush rendering with other traditional marking media, as described above).

As “digital artists” we, now find ourselves in the lag time between the traditional interpretations of most of the terms we would like to use to describe what we do and the acceptance by a significant number of art appreciators for the ways in which digital technology has expanded or colored the meaning and use of these terms.

Ordinarily this disconnect between what we call it and what it actually is would be cause for examination and even promotion. Usually the art's world is attracted by innovation, new ideas, concepts and working methods. But in the haste to have digital innovations, ideas, concepts and working methods accepted as if they are seamlessly similar to traditional means for creating art, we may be throwing the baby out with the bath water. We say, we “paint”, we “cut and paste”, we “dodge or burn”; but only in terms of visible outcome do we actually do any of these things. Some people really want to know how you can call it a painting when there is no pigment, brushes or canvas. Some people want to know how you can make a photograph without sequestering yourself in the dark and dipping your fingers in smelly chemicals. Some people want to know how you can call it a print when there is no physical matrix brought under pressure against paper to make an “imprint”. Some people want to know how you can push some buttons, evoke an algorithm designed by an unknown mathematician, packaged by another team of software designers for “ease of operation” and call it “Art”. Perhaps we shouldn’t have used these terms at all but rather focused more attention on how very different digital art-making is.

Of course, a good part of this disconnect has to do with how deeply digitalism threatens some haloed art paradigms. Such as “originality” (noted above) or “materiality”. While most everyone agrees that art should be made of some thing or another, everyone can agree that art begins as an idea in the brain of the artist. If one is lucky, this idea may be an “original”, meaning that no other brain has held this idea before this time. History has proven that this rarely happens, but let’s assume we have an original idea. Let’s also assume that this idea can not be adequately expressed in words and requires some form of, well…form. This will require material and tools and technique. So, unless we are going to re-invent all these, we are most likely to choose some established materials to objectify this brilliant idea. Here, the original idea which has been up to this point pure thought runs into much more competition or challenge during its conversion to material. Since each material or working method has a history attached to it, “originality” becomes clouded by what has been done with these materials in the past. For example, pity the poor original idea that finds expression as a Cubist painting. No matter how original the idea the baggage of its materiality would undermine it.

Many forms of digital art, especially the visual digital arts, have suffered criticism for the lack of materiality. Many point out the lack of real texture, of the embossed quality of a traditional etching, of the lack of painterly smells, the smeary feel of the pigments. The fact of digital art is that most of the material, tools and techniques for making art have been re-invented and that digital freehand-mark-making is quite a different animal from traditional painting. The same may be said for photography and printing and yet instead of celebrating this we try to ameliorate it by adopting traditional terminology and copying traditional materials and fitting into traditional exhibition and marketing paradigms.

Digital Art will not come into its full maturity until we are willing to drop old ways and take the far riskier, more unsure avenues that have opened up to us. Why not relish in the closer similarity that the digital “original” shares with pure thought; that being, that it is and will always be immaterial code stored in some sort of ever active, always amendable state. That any direct objectification of that coded original is a “production” (not a reproduction) of the original thought-work. That viewing a digital art work is more like experiencing a poem, or a film for that matter, in that the bringing forth of that image into a material space represents not only the poem itself but the “performance” of a specific set of visualization tools. For a poem is nothing until it is read and a film is just a big round metal can until it is projected.

Of course, digital artists need to eat and people still need to possess things, so selling and owning will never disappear. But with digital art we make a significant step toward the appreciation of art being less about possession and more about sharing with the mind of the artist. That is not to say that the impression of texture is not there, nor is light or form absent. What digital art points out so completely is something we have known all along; that these “things” are all illusions at the service of an even more illusive and immaterial “original”, which remains always in a state resembling that of our thoughts. These “things” are among the lies that, as Picasso noted, art employs to reveal the truth.

JD Jarvis
December, 2004

Promise, Paradox and Opportunity

Promise, Paradox and Opportunity
by John Holloway

NOTE

John Holloway works as a 3d virtual reality modeling specialist at the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting from the University of Cincinnati in 1981 and practiced as a full-time painter for more than a decade, before returning to school to study scientific visualization and C++ programming . He has applied haptic technology, which investigates the interaction between the computer and touch, to the practice of his art, and says, "I have an avid interest and passion for digital technology but I am first and foremost an artist, and an analog artist at that.”

In April 2005 he spoke about his art at a conference on digital content at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. The following text was developed from notes generated for his presentation there. He advises that the issues presented below deserve much deeper review and analysis, and that it is his intention here only to present an overview of these ideas.



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When the personal computer was introduced to our culture, we were promised three things:


Greater access to information

More control over our lives

More free time as a result of higher productivity levels
As it turns out we realized only one out of these three. The remaining two are debatable, I suppose. "More control over our lives" is certainly debatable. Productivity levels have definitely increased but it appears that along with that has come a greater demand for productivity. This demand has served to remove what otherwise would have been "more free time" for the digital worker. "Greater access to information" for the artist has proved to be a mixed blessing. Nonetheless, the result has proven to mean access to mark-making tools (i.e., programs) that will continue to grow in number, variety and quality.

This growing access to tools poses a dilemma for those of us that try to avail ourselves to as many applications as can be found. It is a dynamic and often rewarding search. But this chase takes time away from art creation. Time is finite so at some point the artist must make a choice and focus on the work at hand. At this point one can then begin the study of a chosen tool set.

The value of tool knowledge cannot be understated. The search for tools as well as the investigation of a chosen set opens one to possibilities, options and insights that otherwise could not be known. Help files are of some value but it is exploration and experimentation within the tool that enlightens.

As with the explorer of tools, those of us who have made a choice in tool sets have the pleasure of confronting a paradox within the tool interface.

Our interface with the computer offers an experience too often contrary to the instinctive approach of the creative temperament. Fluid use of computer interfaces for the artist requires a linear and disciplined understanding of the tool. This is completely in opposition to the curvilinear discipline demanded by analog creative tools. This difference in approach is due to the organic nature of analog tool sets versus the synthetic nature of digital tool sets. Here in lies a curious paradox for the digital artist.

At once this paradox presents itself as an encumbrance and obstacle to the artist who simply wants to get on with the work at hand. The immediate desire is to seek out an interface that is transparent to the inner workings of the machine. Digital media is a vast and exciting environment. There are products available that allow the user to jump in immediately without any understanding of "what is under the hood," so to speak. But going down the path of the "transparent interface" denies artists the opportunity for a much richer experience that comes of an understanding of the fundamental medium. An understanding of the digital medium cannot be gained by exclusive involvement in content development for media. I am by no means advocating that artists necessarily should become graphics programmers. Although, a brief introduction to the mysteries of computer science does provide insight into the paradigm of the medium the digital artist is professing to be involved in. At the very least this type of study will make the artist more knowledgeable of the brush chosen, what it is good for and how ones efforts fit into the paradigm of the broader digital medium. This paradox within the interface, the meeting of the curvilinear mindset with the linear toolset is compelling, uniquely frustrating, and a rare opportunity.

View from an analog perspective

One of the persistent criticisms of digital art is its unnaturalness. The apparent sterility and synthetic nature of the final work seems at once unrewarding. It is the nature of the beast so to speak and quite unavoidable. But what is natural really? Are we natural? If we are and we created this technology then does it not qualify as natural by default? By extension is it then possible for us to create something that is not natural? But I digress. This argument is metaphysical and quite possibly irrelevant. The digital medium is after all a purely synthetic development and presentation venue. The artist must accept this effect and work within its natural confines and limitations as one would with analog materials and venues.

Arguments against digital art

Issue #1: Presentation
The digital arts presentation venue poses the first obstacle to the analog perspective. The physical separation of the artist from the image posed by the monitor itself can be difficult to accept. The digital image is perceived as being tangibly flat. This is true and false at once as the effect is an inherent illusion. In truth the image hardly exits at all. The viewer actually is only seeing the result of the decoding of virtual zeros and ones that exist as digital signatures (physical pits) on the synthetic medium of the hard disc. The cold flat surface of the monitor on the other hand is not an illusion.

Issue #2: Color
The digital image is backlit and the colors are additive rather than subtractive. Incidentally this is exactly the kind of vibrant color that the Italian Futurist Carlo Carra is calling for in his paper "The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells". Digital technology was made to order for the Futurist movement of the early 1900's. Alas, timing is everything.

Issue #3: Hardware
Monitors vary greatly in their settings and presentation of colors. Video cards and memory capacity influence the viewing experience as well. The hardware issues alone fill volumes of research. In this we are all greatly in the debt to the engineers who pursue these issues.

Issue #4: Intellectual Property (IP)
The issue of "Intellectual Property" is the real elephant in the middle of the room that we have only begun to face as an art culture. Witness the turmoil within the audio and movie industry. When we move our work off of our local hard disc we are quite literally putting a drop of ourselves into a massive and you might say, permeable, medium. Our content is immediately absorbed into the world network, which has a life of its own. This medium is global and that is no longer just a catch phrase ... it is a living truth.

Our culture has yet to develop an IP model for digital art that is as universally applicable, effective and accepted as that for the analog arts. Consider the time that we have devoted to the development of a model for the analog arts. I am hopeful that an equally effective model will evolve for the digital realm as well.

Issue #5: Electricity
Finally, what if the electricity goes out? This is perhaps the weakest link for the digital artist. Now where is the art? Wasn't the image essentially just an expression of idea and emotion?

This issue above all others speaks to me of the notion of preciousness of images. The digital medium challenges the very essence of the preciousness and uniqueness of the image.

Willem de Kooning in "What Abstract Art Means to Me" (1951) wrote:


The first man who began to speak, whoever he was, must have intended it. For surely it is talking that has put "Art" into painting. Nothing is positive about art except that it is a word. Right from there to here all art became literary. We are not yet living in a world where everything is self-evident. It is very interesting to notice that a lot of people who want to take the talking out of painting, for instance, do nothing else but talk about it. That is no contradiction, however. The art in it is the forever-mute part you can talk about forever.
Ah, and so we are back to the realm of metaphysics and the philosophy of art. For many in the art world all of this is quite enough to dismiss the validity of the digital arts as art at all. This reaction is quite understandable and yet reminiscent of the welcome received by the Fauves, Impressionists, Cubists, Italian Futurists, Abstract Expressionists, Minimalists and quite nearly every art movement as it has arrived on the threshold of cultural consciousness. The digital medium challenges quite nearly all of the long held precepts of the art world at many different levels.

Marshal McLuhan described this effect in the 1960's through his many works. I would highly recommend the reading of any of his many books to digital artists if only to get a sense of the dynamism and philosophical impact of the medium they are involved in.

Resistance to change is perfectly understandable. The implications of the new threaten what we believe to be true. This agitation in the mind of the thinking artist is very healthy. It provokes introspection, review and questions regarding where one invests time and resources. What one considers valid and essentially art is an abstraction always worth reconsidering.

As for me, these issues only serve to enhance the mystery and uniqueness of digital media and its applications. One of the qualities I find most dynamic about the world of digital art is its propensity for creating new questions, reviving once-thought resolved issues and opening new avenues of inquiry on multiple levels.

The digital medium is unique in this aspect as it is so far ranging in its impact on our lives.

The far reaching implications made by the issues presented to us by the digital medium have revitalized and added an entirely new dynamism to the field of art philosophy, not to mention commerce.

The sacred moment...revelation

It has been suggested by many that, if one is working in a digital environment, it is not possible to lose created visual effects. The marketing departments of corporations that develop software and other members of our corporate and civil cultures support this notion in the main. Individuals seeking quick, easy and cheap solutions to the visualization of ideas and data too often find this notion so irresistible as to believe it as fact. These same folks have fostered the concept that creativity can be had at the simple click of the mouse. The practicing digital artist knows better.

The "undo" function as well as other digital features such as runtime history, and incremental file saving all can be used to support the idea that visual effects cannot be lost. Strictly speaking there is some grain of truth in this. However, this posit is true only to the extent that the "linear discipline" of the developer is engaged.

There is that moment in the creative process when a perceived "perfect balance" is realized (epiphany, revelation). A balance between what is intended and what has been visualized. Anything short of saving the file at this moment will mean a total loss of what currently is. We all know that moment when it presents itself or sadly too soon after it has passed. It is the lucky developer that resists the compulsion to "make it better", stop editing and save to a unique file name.

Backup media is highly recommended in art production. More information than is needed beats not enough every time. An archiving discipline is of inestimable value for artists working in any medium.

Available Undo's are finite to a session. What is more, there is a limit to the linear management skills possessed by artists generally. Having a runtime history available is helpful but the trick is in remembering the point where it happened and what layers were visible at the time. Taking consistent notes on the side and exporting current, uniquely named and time-stamped renderings periodically is an effective strategy as well. Some software also permits the artist to imbed notes and other user data within a file.

The delicate balance of cognition and emotion is a discipline that must be maintained by artists working in the digital or analog realms. The computer demands a level of attention to the management of data quite beyond that of analog mediums. A linear discipline, perspective and sensitivity are required. This requirement works in direct opposition to the curvilinear instincts of the creative mind and process. Too often the patterns through which the creative process takes us are quite irregular and wholly unpredictable. These patterns are not easily managed in a digital and necessarily linear creative tool environment.

Herein lies a necessary pact with the devil, if you will, which the artist must make to work effectively and at some point fluidly through the paradox the computer presents to the creative process. This "pact" is an acceptance on the part of the artist of the limitations of and requirements made by the computer of the artist.

Having accepted the computer and its limitations the artist can begin to find a comfort level with it. Accepting the tool for what it is will go a long way towards removing the distraction of frustration and open one to the possibilities available. This can take some time but once achieved the moment of balance in ones work is more easily recognized, seized upon and managed when it occurs.

Tools - the responsibility of understanding

As with any of the traditional analog art forms, the quality and fidelity of the visualization is dependant upon the artists' ability to manipulate the chosen toolset. For example, the difference of effect between a sable and a bristle brush can be quite dramatic. It is the painter's responsibility to understand the use of the two to adequately express himself or herself. The different tones of expression between oils, watercolor, acrylic, pencil, conte, or combinations of these in a piece are paramount to the quality of the final image and its ability to communicate. The substrate one chooses to work upon has everything to do with the final presentation and interpretation of the completed work. The chosen materials and their manipulation set the tone of the final work and its ability to project the artist's intent. This is no less true with digital media. Having chosen to work through the computer immediately sets a tone to ones works. This choice provides the artist with many options as well as limitations. Ones choice in hardware and operating system has far reaching implications as to how one will approach their work as well as relate to the rest of the digital community.

Within the digital arts the toolsets are varied and often quite complex. The depth of utility in the better applications is such that it is the rare user indeed that truly grasps the extent of possibilities within the tool. This depth of understanding can only come with extensive hands-on experience and experimentation over time. Regular study and reference to provided documentation is an obvious help in this regard.

Irrespective of ones knowledge of a tool, there are multiple parameters that control and influence the final outcome of any one process. By extension, the combination of processes exponentially increase the importance of the attention paid to controlling tool and data management parameters.

This being the case it is the responsibility of the digital artist to know his or her chosen tools to the greatest extent possible. A passing knowledge of parameter manipulation and dependence on basic default settings within a tool can only result in the simplest and most common of results. Default settings can only offer the most basic of images. Of course it can be argued that no image is without value and in many cases it is the most minimal use of elements that can render the most powerful of images. But we will leave this issue for another discussion.

In the end it is the responsibility and obligation of the artist to know the capabilities and appropriateness of the tools selected to execute a project. The varieties of tools available to the digital artist are mind-boggling. The depth and utility of these tools is such that it is unlikely the artist will master even a fraction of what is available.

As a participant in the digital medium the artist can simplify this search for tool knowledge by automating the activity to a degree. Almost all of the digital toolmakers of note offer news releases. The artist need only include himself or herself on a list to receive these notifications. Having listed themselves by providing an email address the artist will periodically receive notifications of tool advancements and tips without having to inquire on their own. Granted much of this information too often proves to be no more than marketing propaganda, but quite often-useful information and leads for further study are provided.

Tool specific user groups are also a great source of information. These groups as with all sources have their limitations in usefulness. User groups deserve attention and quite often prove to be a great resource for information and sometimes inspiration. There is no obligation to participate in these group discussions but I have found that simply monitoring the threads can offer a wealth of information that can be quite valuable.

Nonetheless we do have an obligation to be familiar with the nature of the products available. In doing this we can, to some degree, evaluate and then determine what tools work best for what we want to accomplish. The beauty of this is that through search and investigation activities new uses and applications will make themselves apparent, opening our creative impulses to possibilities we previously did not know existed.

A creative paradox

There is a paradox in the interface between the artist and the computer. It is a paradox that provides for the most intrinsic element in the visualization of the creative process. There is a relational dichotomy that can be found in the necessary cooperation between the linear demands of the computer and the curvilinear approach of the artist towards his or her work. The constant confrontation with this dichotomy the artist experiences is just exactly what can provide for the unplanned and unexpected that is so valuable in ones creative work. I believe that this very contradiction between the curvilinear pattern of the artist's natural mindset and the rigid linear demands of the computer provides just the spiritual tension that can be of inestimable value to the artist.

The recognized "Happy Accident", the "Ah Hah," has been the lynch pin of abstraction in painting since well before the advent of the abstract expressionists. The Dutch masters made regular and disciplined use of this through their glazes. It is not inconceivable that this affect was the spark that set off the Italian renaissance. Perhaps it was this "Ah Hah" moment that was the genesis of painting as a pragmatic form of expression from the start.

Nonetheless, it is this elusive moment of revelation, which marks the relevance of the unexpected in any composition. Fractal artists may believe that this is happening to some degree by default in their work. And perhaps they are right. After all, mathematics is the basic language of the CPU and this language has the ability to describe quite nearly anything, some would say.

It has been the criticism of the analog world for some time that digital art is too clean, too precise...too linear to be considered other than contrived. The linear nature of the tool seems to enforce a precision that at once is compelling and yet sterile for many. Artists have gone to great lengths to overcome this through careful planning and elaborate techniques, many with great success. I propose that this problem can be overcome very simply by giving in to the paradoxical relationship between the Linear machine process and the Curvilinear approach of the user.

The key element in this paradox is "us" actually. Sounds pretty familiar. The same situation exists in analog creative processes as well. Working in the analog mediums is more akin to breathing. We share a visceral and quite nearly symbiotic relationship with the materials and venue of the analog realm.

What is unique in this digital situation is evidenced in the enforced linear nature of a synthetic medium versus the default organic and curvilinear nature of the artist's mindset. This is the paradox that makes the initial approach to digital work so awkward for the analog purist. Instinctively we want the fluidity of interface we have in the analog dimension but are frustrated at the outset with a seemingly unnatural, purely synthetic, and less than rewarding tactile experience with the computer. We are at once set apart from the work. Our only contact is with the keyboard and the mouse or stylus. This is an abstraction that simply must be accepted. It is the nature of the digital toolset.

For some this can prove to be more repulsive or intimidating than for others. Obviously there are many of us now who have been working with this type of interface for the greater part of our careers if not from the very beginning. For these people the acceptance of this abstraction is a non-issue.

The fact that there is a significant population if not a generation of artists that have little to no experience with the creation of art in the analog dimension is a real curiosity in our time. This is an issue of great importance but is beyond the scope of my intentions here.

Complete acceptance of what amounts to a synthetic abstraction of analog processes is the first step to working with the paradox of the digital interface. Having accepted this working environment it is now just a matter of becoming well informed and practiced with the chosen tool set. This can only come with experience and study

Understanding and comfort with the toolset comes as a result of extended hands on experience, exploration and experimentation. As the artist approaches a comfort zone with the toolset the paradox of the interface will begin to work more in ones favor. The recognition of balance of color and the tension of compositional elements soon becomes much easier to recognize and more fluid in its execution.

The tool makers

Next to tool usage and exploration, tool development is an equally dynamic endeavor. We all have our wish lists but imagine having the expertise to realize those wishes. Unfortunately the discipline of tool development requires a tremendous investment of ones time. This study pretty much precludes significant creative usage of the tools one might develop. The craft of graphics programming is equally as time consuming and compelling as image creation. We are greatly in the debt of those who have chosen this path and continue to provide and advance the magnificent software that is available today. Not to mention those that are doing the basic research that provides the groundwork for the tools we will use tomorrow. I cannot speak highly enough of the "tool makers".

The guild of tool makers has a long and rich history. From the makers of brushes and the grinders of pigment to the programmers and QA engineers of software and hardware (specifically the CPU and GPU developers) we are greatly indebted. Our current endeavors as digital artists are now possible as a result of their efforts.

Artificial Intelligence

Soon Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology will be employed in many of our tool sets. Actually to varying degrees this has already begun. The advent of AI in our tool sets will be a mixed blessing. I suspect that the loss of human control in the interface that this will represent may quite possibly drive many of us back to the analog arts.

There is a digital culture in the creative world even now that has promoted the transparency of the operating system (OS) to the user for years quite successfully. This culture has lulled many digital artists into a blissful lack of knowledge (granted not in all cases but certainly in new users) of the basic nature of the computer and by extension the digital medium generally. The general effect of this has been the development of an art culture with a finely-tuned awareness of specific media at the expense of an understanding of the overall medium and the interrelationship between the two. The advent of AI on digital culture may only serve to enhance this phenomenon. These developers as well as those new to techno culture will succumb to the convenience of AI quite easily and willingly, as they will not know nor care that it had been or could be otherwise

The imposition of AI on creative digital tools will have a dramatic impact on the human aesthetic. This technology may very well realize the corporate dream of synthetic creativity at the click of a mouse. It certainly will be intriguing to watch this come about, if indeed it does.

Conclusion

The paradox of the computer interface for the creative temperament offers obstacles as well as unique opportunities.

The challenges I see for the artist are to accept the limitations, become knowledgeable of and finally comfortable with the linear discipline demanded by the computer. Having done this, the benefit is the resultant ability to manage linear data and then bend it to creative purposes.

Having successfully made this bargain and resisted the temptations of the transparent interface the artist is no longer bound to the media that ones content is created for. Having opened ones understanding to the nature of the OS through study and experience the artist will no longer be limited to the software interface but will be open to the possibilities of the broader digital medium at large.

Depending upon the digital path chosen by the artist, the learning curve can be daunting. Nonetheless the rewards that can be gained by disciplined and persistent digital pursuits can vastly exceed the effort expended getting there, by magnitudes.

June 2005

JD Jarvis Essay

An Art Lover's Guide to Digital Art
Essay by JD Jarvis


WHAT IS DIGITAL ART?

Photographer, artist and philosopher Larry Bolch wrote, "Photography is not an art. It is a medium through which artist's may create art." One can make the same statement about so called "digital art". Considering digital as a medium for the creation of art, rather than an art itself doesn't help narrow it down much, however; because then you have to wonder; "which art?" Perhaps a better way to state the problem, today, is to ask; "What isn't digital art?" Computers have invaded and expanded nearly every art form. From the digital creation, recording, manipulation and distribution of music, to animation and film editing; from word processing to the instantaneous cueing of hundreds of complex theatrical lighting and scenery changes digital tools are there helping artists make art. Yet, if you are an artist making two-dimensional compositions for display on the web or for sale as any of a wide variety of print you may expect some strange resistance and lack of external validation.

No one seems to question the authenticity of a digitally performed theatrical cue or to worry that the word processor has made writing too easy. Now that the computer has replaced the mathematician's chalkboard, pencil and slide rule, no one asks, by virtue of the tools or lack of materials used; "Is that real math or did the computer do it?" Still, as pervasive as digital tools have become in the creation of a wide range of art forms these questions are asked of two-dimensional inanimate art created on a computer. For the sake of this review this is what I mean by "digital art". And, with the help of some wonderful examples collected here by the MOCA gallery, we will look to where this work has come and perhaps shed some light on the path ahead.

PLAYING THE MUSIC

Bolch also observed, "the artist chooses the media and the goal of every artist is to become fluent enough with the media to transcend it. At some point you pass from playing the piano to playing music." As digital tools are employed by more artists working in more diverse fields the analogies that for so long have attempted to describe the commonalties of all art forms begin to come into sharper focus. The writer, musician, painter, the film editor or photographer sit down before pretty much the same sort of art making devise and share the common craft of digital information processing to achieve the work; making it immediately clear how poetry can share a kinship to painting, photography and music.

Well over a decade of practice and experimentation in making digital art has brought to the scene artists possessing a fine degree of skill with imaging software. And, yet the average person or art lover knows little of what a digital artist does to create their work. Software salesman are of little help, since they work hard to promote the myth that art on a computer is just a mouse click away. Compared to painting which, even though few can handle expertly, nearly all can understand the process; the learning curve for the appreciation of digital art seems almost as steep as for the manipulation of the tools themselves. However, this is not an excuse for the critic or art lover who refuses to seriously consider digital art simply because they don't know how it is made. Art is not about the tools used to make it; but in the organization of color, line, form, composition, rhythm and the interplay of all these in support of the subject matter or intent of the work itself. These are the basic and well established tenants of visual art and as fundamental to digital art work as to the cave paintings of Lascaux.

DIGITAL PAINT AND DRAW : Natural Media

This point is best demonstrated by work created with "Natural Media" software. The digital artist working in this vein has an assortment of tools designed to make marks which simulate on the computer screen and in print nearly all traditional paint and draw tools. In the MOCA galleries the works of Mavi Roberto, Joan Myerson Shrager, Jago Titcomb, D.L. Zimmerman, and Steiner Rosenburg are prime examples of this genre of digital art. Their pictures are built up mark upon mark until the composition is complete. The look and even a good part of the feel of traditional drawing and painting media can be achieved with skill and patience. That these marks appear as pure light on a glass screen is indication of both the revolutionary advances and the tradeoffs that the digital artist makes.

New production techniques such as multiple undo, and the ability to save work at various stages along its development and to integrate one version or piece of art seamlessly into another are great boons to art making. Digital work never reaches that level of material preciousness at which even the most courageous painter would not risk destroying their work just to follow some wild inspiration. The digital artist has adopted a medium that works as fast as one's imagination and presents constant opportunities to refine composition and fine tune color. On the other hand, spontaneous accidents and the effects of gravity do not come easy in digital media and often what can be achieved in a single looping wet drippy stroke of paint must be rendered laboriously by the digital artist. Not having to stretch canvas, wash brushes or mix and then wait for paint to dry may deny the digital artist some material pleasures, but also saves time. While elapsed time is certainly not an issue nor a criterion for judging any piece of art, time saved using digital tools is almost always re-invested in experimentation and decision making. Subsequently, this investment in design should make digital art among the tightest and most well considered compositions in art today.

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY: Photo-Manipulation

With the genre of "Photo-Manipulation" we recognize how much digital art shares with the art form of photography. The first highly technologically driven art making system to suffer the burden of "point and click" simplicity, traditional photography had to wait out the proliferation of popular understanding of the process and the subsequent recognition by the masses of the nuances necessary to create great pictures before gaining its rightful place in the world of fine art. Today this struggle belongs to digital art. But it is digital photography and the lessons learned by traditional photography's move up to fine art that is helping to drive the ultimate acceptance of digital art. And, in return, the digital darkroom has revolutionized how we make photographic art.

Producing sensitive imagery in the tradition of the chemical dark room, as we see reflected in the work of Jeff Alu , Steve Bingham, and Ricardo Baez Duarte required tedious and imperfect techniques that are now achieved with unprecedented speed and pin point control by artists who have more time to focus on ideas and composition than the long process of trial and error that was necessary leading to a degree of control over wet photography. Digital photography tools reduce exposure to dangerous and uncomfortable studio situations while expanding aesthetic potentials through new production techniques. And, this particular expanded aesthetic is with us constantly in our daily lives.

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY: Photo-Collage

As photography reached a level of maturity in the 1920's and 30's many modernist artists began to experiment with different techniques of using photos in their art; among them the collage and montage. In the USA during the1950's the fad of psychoanalysis coupled with the advertising industry's discovery that surrealistic imagery in its attention to sex and other dreams of desire was highly marketable; fostered an enduring love for "trick photography". It is no small coincidence that a couple of decades later page layout, photo-editing and typography harbored the first mass oriented implementation of digital imaging tools. The advertising and magazine industry jumped at the chance to have one machine that could handle all these different crafts and it has never looked back. Thus, "photo-collage" represented in the MOCA collection by the work of artists Damnengine, Larry Hopewell, and Gulner Guvenc has become the most prevalent kind of digital art exhibited anywhere, today. Collage is most often the kind of art that people seek to do with their new computers and, as such, has formed a populist wave of art making that can hardly be ignored.

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY: Tabloid Culture

Even before photography became a fine art it was a popular one. Due, in no small part, to what philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin called the "voodoo cult" of photography. That is, the ability for a photograph to freeze time and preserve people, places and events long after they disappear in the mists of memory. Therefore, the photograph, even a simple and personal snap shot, is a very potent item, whose aura in our everyday lives can surpass that of art. Of course, along with this reverence comes the reverse and the purposeful mutilation of a photograph can harbor a darker spirit. This darker spirit has become quite popular in itself as a post modern society turns to themes and activities previously considered "on the fringe". I ascribe the term "Tabloid Culture" to this type of art as a nod to the marginality from which it is ascending and to the media which has made it so relatively accessible. And, of course, digital tools are there helping it happen.

The highest form of this art is displayed in the MOCA galleries of Alessandro Bavari, David Ho, and Shannon Hourigan. And, while these artists use techniques and tools outside of the range of simple photo-manipulation, their intent to create dark, mysterious, uncomfortable and often allegorical illustrations with amazing photographic realism is quite evident and striking. On the other hand, the dark collages of Shannon Hourigan retain more of the character of a direct photograph. In doing so, Hourigan manages to create work that fully exploits this voodoo concept of photography and in the disfiguration and distortions of her photgraphic images questions of violence, body image and self mutilation are given full voice.

THE QUEST FOR PRESENCE: Fractals

In and of itself, however, paint is paint. Photography and even collage are no longer anything new. And, since we already know that art is not about the tools that we use to make it; we might rightfully ask, so what's new about digital art? For well over two hundred years the world of fine art and its counterpart in academia have been driven by the notion of stylistic identification and innovation thus creating the age of "isms". Art work has come to be judged either by how well it fits into an existing style, or is favored most when it breaks beyond these prized barriers and delivers something all together and strikingly new. For digital art to join in this time honored game, to become present in the world of Fine Arts, it must move beyond mimicry of traditional media and forge new visual ground.

In order to survey this new territory the artist must search for those things that no other visual arts tools can do. For example, computers are number crunching machines with a propensity for diligently performing tedious tasks at lightning speeds; data in data out. This was of little value to the visual artist until 1972 when Benoit Mandelbrot brought together his own scattered research in "self similarity and iteration" and named it "fractal geometry". Almost instantly from that point through today the science of mapping the hidden geometry of nature has been a visual matter. Fractal geometry provides the mathematical algorithms that are the virtual backbone of many of the unique tools that digital image editing and generating software are built upon.

For certain artists this means the creation of imagery that is both excitingly new and strangely familiar as seen in the MOCA galleries of artists Janet Parke and Karin Kuhlmann.

Fractals are patently beautiful with breathtaking depth, sumptuous color, dynamic flowing lines that tickle and delight the eye. In their repetition of forms is suggested the math of the eternal. As such, fractal imagery is often powerful and always seductive. And, yet fractals while wildly varied are still highly recognizable "formula based" images. This makes working with fractals some of the edgiest digital work being done, because it yields imagery that can so easily seem trite and lacking in human warmth, putting itself directly on a collision course with those that fear mechanization of art. How does one make art that springs from the cold soul of the motherboard and yet carries the caress of a human hand and heart?

Integrative Digital Art

The answer to this challenge comes in another of the computer's innate abilities, that being the ability, by the reduction of all sorts of input into a homogeneous data flow, to integrate and synthesize widely divergent material into a single work In other words, not just paint or photo or fractal, but a fluid synthesis of all sorts and kinds of media, materials, processes and styles. This "Integrative Digital Art" yields some highly personal and varied approaches to how the art is made, as well as, how it looks. It brings into play all the imaging sources, drawing tools, automated filters, traditional and digital processes that one can summon. It explodes and expands "multi-media" by being, virtually, every media. There are many strong examples of this in the MOCA collection by artists such as, Hans Deiter Grossmann, Afanassy Pud, John Clive, Kent Oberheu, Kolja Tatic, Ileana Frometa Grillo, and Orna Ben-Shoshan.

You may notice that none of these artist's works looks like the next. There is, therefore, no discernible emergent style. So, if we are about playing the same, age old game of stylistic innovation visa vi the established world of "Fine Art"; even this genre of digital art has reason for being marginalized by "the big show".

THE TYRANNY OF NEWNESS

No artist sets out to create a style. Often one is directed by technique or philosophy or a new tool to innovate, but the recognition of a style has more to do with the critics, galleries and academicians that struggle to ascribe words, labels, context and a re-sale price, after the fact, to the artist's work. All well and good, until the drive to innovate new styles becomes a major criterion for evaluating the relative worth of any particular work of art. Or, until a whole art form is proclaimed "dead" by virtue of apparent inability to adequately perform on the stage of stylistic innovation. Then, we must question if, rather than the art being dead, perhaps it is the person looking at the art that has succumb. With styles being the actual purview of the critic, we might proclaim it is the critic and not the artist that has failed to create something new.

In truth, we may not be able to adequately address the question, "what's new", in two dimensional inanimate art simply by employing digital tools. Today, looking at the range of such art, all of which can be pigeon-holed neatly into this "ism" or that, regardless of the tools employed; we may have to consider that, in a broad sense, things have run their course stylistically. Which is to say that the "stylemakers", the critics, galleries and academicians, have created a sufficient number of broadly defined styles as to fit all occasions and visual statements. So that one can, with a good degree of jaded safety, say, "I've seen that, we've been there." Consider that art commentary and marketing based on stylistic trends has died. Perhaps we have entered an era where art commentary must become as nuanced and as sensitive to individual perception as the artists themselves. Art is no longer a matter of this style or that style. It is a thick, murky, strong brew of people and tools and diverse expression. Style has become just another tool of that expression and since art is not about the tools used to make it, art criticism can no longer be an evaluation based on style or genre. Instead of a dead-end, I see a great "jumping-off-point" wherein the strength and worth of a visual statement can be evaluated based on one's skill to manipulate line, composition, color, form, rhythm...plus an artist’s sensitivity in selecting and manipulating a visual style along with the other tools used to create a particular work of Art.

In his book, "The Art Spirit" Robert Henri states, "...there is the new movement. There always has been the new movement and there always will be the new movement.. It is necessary to pierce to the core to get at the value of a movement and not be confused by its sensational exterior." In the case of visual digital art, a good indication as to the nature of this core comes by way of recent developments in music; another "digital art". Everyone is quite aware of how digital tools have revolutionized the making and distribution of popular music. There is an explosion of new music created and distributed by individuals utilizing smaller, more powerful and more affordable digital studios and tools. Driven by creativity and artistic desire without requiring "big money", mass approval and massive retun on investment, this whole movement has the "music industry" ( a close facsimile of the "Fine Arts" industrial complex) quaking in their Gucci's. In a recent NPR report, Roger Linn, inventor of digital drum pads and a session guitarist, foresees the day when "there'll be fewer professional musicians, but more people making music."

In the same report, Chicago recording engineer, Steve Albini names this phenomenon "the triumph of the amateur" and notes the same trends one can observe in the visual digital arts. According to Albini this triumph of the amateur, "has led, aesthetically, to a lot of poor sounding recordings as musicians experiment with equipment without basic knowledge of audio recording. But, culturally, it has been democratizing, empowering and valuable." In terms of the craft of visual art, rules have been broken and often these new artists appear to know much more about software than art. But, the genie is out of the box and expanding creative bandwidth will always win out over perserving outmoded traditions and dogma.

Don Archer, creator and chief curator for the MOCA website, sees strong evidence that the kind of digital art we see here is the most popular and widely practiced art making of all time. "Digital art needs no defense. It's here, it's pervasive, it's succeeded in encouraging digital artists by the tens of thousands all over the world. It is the most popular art form ever. It should be taken for granted. It does not need the imprimatur of fine art critics, which will come anyway."

THE ROAD AHEAD: A Futurist's View

That we find very little of the two dimensional visual digital art that I have been focused on here in this essay in the established fine arts galleries and magazines is strongly indicative of where the truly vast market and validation for this work lies. It is "out there" in that much larger world which has, for so long, been disenfranchised. Ahead lies an even more far reaching period of democratization and the advancement of new markets, modes of display and distribution that will certainly revolutionize all aspects of what we now call "art". Style will become a tool for expression, not opression. Art will become, simultaneously more personal and more pervasive.

In this essay I have limited my comments to specific "styles" of one particular art form, this is not to say that digital tools will not lay the basis for, as of yet, unimagined new "art forms". As we more fully realize the consequences of a media which can integrate widely different input into a unifying form of binary expression and translate that expression into a myriad of perceived forms, we will arrive at a whole new terrain for, not only art, but how we perceive and experience our own consciousness. We will have "symbiotic art", capable of expressing color as sound and motion as music. The observer will become a functionary of the art itself and the designer will become a poet of the senses. With this will come the awareness that we already live in a virtual world transmitted to us by our evolved senses that, after all, only give us a single version of what remains, without us to observe it, a basically undifferentiated universe of electromagnetic waves, particles and constant energetic motion and change.

JD Jarvis
November, 2002
Las Cruces, NM