Digital Art, the Art of Our Age
Art has been found to exist in virtually every known human culture and countless artistic techniques and media have evolved over the ages. Digital art is one of the more recent media to have emerged, and we are excited about its amazing potential.
Photo of Vienna Secession Building, by Gryffindo
Written above the Vienna Secession building is the phrase:
"to every age its art and to art its freedom"
(Der Zeit ihre Kunst. Der Kunst ihre Freiheit).
We believe digital art is the art of our age, and that digital art brings new degrees of freedom to creative expression.
To highlight the opportunities we see in digital art, let’s consider separately the aspects of creation, storage, and presentation.
Creation. Digital art relies on digital tools (software) for its creation. Digital tools can provide unprecedented control over the creative process, allowing for pixel-level precision and access to millions of colors. They also provide amazing freedom, by enabling an artist to explore a limitless number of alternative representations, and without the waste of material resources.
Storage. Digital art is stored in a digital medium (binary files). This digital representation enables exceptional flexibility with regards to customization (like changes in aspect ratios and sizes, cropping, etc.) and variability (opportunities for creating variations and derivative works).
Presentation. Digital art, in its native digital medium, must be presented/experienced by some kind of software application on a digital output device (like a computer monitor). This can complicate its presentation and preservation [1]. By using digital printing technologies, digital artworks can be materialized onto many types of physical supports and enjoyed as art objects, similar to traditional artworks.
We believe the control provided by digital tools, combined with the flexibility of digital media and the advances in digital printing technologies, provide an infinite palette for artistic expression.
[1] “Challenges for a Ubiquitous Museum: Presenting and Preserving New Media”, by Christiane Paul