In a global economic landscape of hyper-commodification and financialisation, efforts to assimilate digital art into the high-stakes commercial art market have so far been rather unsuccessful, presumably because digital artworks cannot easily assume the status of precious object worthy of collection. This essay explores the use of blockchain technologies in attempts to create proprietary digital art markets in which uncommodifiable digital artworks are financialised as artificially scarce commodities. Using the decentralisation techniques and distributed database protocols underlying (...) current cryptocurrency technologies, such efforts, exemplified here by the platform Monegraph, tend to be presented as concerns with the interest of digital artists and with shifting ontologies of the contemporary work of art. I challenge this characterisation, and argue, in a discussion that combines aesthetic theory, legal and philosophical theories of intellectual property, rhetorical analysis and research in the political economy of new media, that the formation of proprietary digital art markets by emerging commercial platforms such as Monegraph constitutes a worrisome amplification of long-established, on-going efforts to fence in creative expression as private property. As I argue, the combination of blockchain-based protocols with established ambitions of intellectual property policy yields hybrid conceptual-computational financial technologies (such as self-enforcing smart contracts attached to digital artefacts) that are unlikely to empower artists but which serve to financialise digital creative practices as a whole, curtailing the critical potential of the digital as an inherently dynamic and potentially uncommodifiable mode of production and artistic expression. (shrink)

Modern technology plays an important role in our daily lives. Many people use technology for their works, interactions, and special interests such as art. Art as a discipline, which expresses human emotion and creative side, takes a new form for its contextualization with the help of information technology. A neologism for this discipline is “digital art.” Some experts who employ a traditional value in their aesthetical perspective consider this new approach unlikely. Walter Benjamin, an eminent figure from this group, (...) stated that art must have an aura in its production as is the case in paintings. With this aura, the work of art and not artwork has uniqueness of value. However, the problem arises when information technology becomes a predominant tool for the work of art. Digital art does not consider the aura as the core value in defining something as a work of art. Furthermore, digital artists think that art can exist within a digital object and maintain its uniqueness. Parallel with the latter, this article will describe the dispute and make a clear statement that a work of art in the digital age does not require aura. (shrink)

With the development of computer hardware and software, digital art is a new discipline. It uses computers and digital technology as tools to perform artistic expression. It can be expanded to various binary numerical codes with computers as the center and can also be refined to various categories of creation with computers. The research scope is set in the field of digital art, and all kinds of accidental factors of digital art creation based on the machine (...) learning algorithm are mined and analyzed for feature correlation. Based on the hidden association relationship of massive data, the study focuses on the implicit association mining of digital art features of data for the recommendation algorithm. The classification and continuous data feature attributes are introduced and discretized, and the binary representation of data features is extended to ensure the diversity of data feature attributes. In order to mine some correlation features in data, a heuristic feature mining method based on minimum support was studied to discover the frequency of correlation features and construct the optimal feature subset. Based on the frequent items of data features, this study observes the heuristic algorithm of digital art feature association mining based on minimum confidence and carries out feature matching based on digital art feature association mining under different situation modes. The validity of the proposed algorithm is verified by using the experimental data of health and medical situations in the machine learning library. (shrink)

Contemporary art based on new media is situated at the intersection of art-as-we-know-it, smart technologies, digital and algorithmic culture, networked economy, politics, as well as bio and techno sciences. Contemporary art enters into intense relations with these fields, including interactions, adoption of methodological devices and approaches, changes of the areas of activity, hybridization and amalgamation. This text explores those features of contemporary life and culture which are affected by digital art and the recombination, appropriation, remediation, reusing, repurposing, and (...) transfer of artistic procedures/tools from one context or field to another. (shrink)

The case studies in this book illuminate how arts and humanities tropes can aid in contextualizing Digital Arts and Humanities, Neogeographic and Social Media activity and data through the creation interpretive schemas to study interactions between visualizations, language, human behaviour, time and place.

In this book we learn that computers can generate visual art with unique aesthetic effects based on innovations in computer technology, and a postmodern naturalization of technology wherein technology becomes something we live in as well as use.

During the Nineties, the diffusion of information and communication technologies allowed a dramatic transformation in art practices. Radically new aesthetic experiences, such as tele-presence, immersivity, responsivity, hyper-mediacy and multimediality, emerge in the framework of the digital arts and call into question not only the traditional status of the work of art but also the fundamental relation with the beholder. The aim of this paper is to define a conceptual framework for the ontology of digital arts by identifying some (...) ontological features that are distinctive to digital idioms. Such an analysis tries to outline how aesthetic and technical innovations affect our cognitive and sensorial relationship with technological artifacts. In the first part, the relation between technogenesis and ontology, as well as the key topics of the ontology of digital arts are discussed. The second part deals with the notion of presence. Despite traditional understandings of digital arts, mainly focused on immateriality, simulation and mediation, my analysis demonstrate how the notion of presence can provide an original perspective in order to understand the ontological status of the mediatized artistic practices. In the last three decades the generalisation of information and telecommunication technologies has played a major role in the transformation of the arts, opening the field to important experiments in the domain of computer graphics, digital audio, robotics and motion capture systems… (Dixon 2007). Peculiar forms of aesthetic experience such as tele-presence, immersivity, responsivity, hyper-mediation and multimediality, progressively arise from digital arts and question not only the status of artwork but also, more generally, the foundational relationship between this latter and the recipient. (shrink)

How can artists create works of computer art or Internet art in which audience members become genuine artists and collaborate with the original artists on the self-same work that they began? To answer this question, this essay will reflect on the work of philosophers who focus on questions concerning art completion and the ontology of computer art. This essay will also reflect on the artistic work of the trio LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner, whose artwork can serve as a model for (...) creating collaborative, digital art. (shrink)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/digital-art/.

This study proposed a children’s digital art ability training system with artificial intelligence-assisted learning, which was designed to achieve the goal of improving children’s drawing ability. AI technology was introduced for outline recognition, hue color matching, and color ratio calculation to machine train students’ cognition of chromatics, and smart glasses were used to view actual augmented reality paintings to enhance the effectiveness of improving elementary school students’ imagination and painting performance through the diversified stimulation of colors. This study adopted (...) the quasi-experimental research method and designs the pre-test and post-test for different groups. The research subjects are the Grade 4 students of an elementary school in Taitung City, Taiwan. The test tools included an imagination test and an evaluation of painting performance ability. The test results of a total of 30 students before and after the experiment included the experimental group that received the children’s digital art ability training system with AI-assisted learning and 30 students in the control group that had not received the teaching were analyzed by covariance. These results were supplemented by the description and interpretation of student feedback, teachers’ reflection notes, and other qualitative data to understand the performance of the students in the experimental group in terms of imagination and painting performance. (shrink)

In recent decades, the internet has become our predominant public space and yet the role of art in this space remains largely unthought. This paper argues that graphic art, and in particular digital graphic art, has great power to shape and transform our thinking and experience. But with that power comes an enormous political and ethical responsibility, a responsibility too often ignored by programmers and computer scientists. This paper uses the work of Denis Schmidt and Jacques Taminiaux as important (...) resources for developing a Heideggerian response to this lack. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to critically address a widespread assumption that reads like this: Works of art that make use of digital media automatically, through interactivity, are generally better suited for generating democratic processes in society than other art forms or phenomena that do not make use of digital media, and, therefore, digital art is more avant-garde than other art forms. By analysing the chains of equivalence underlying this assumption the article presents and discusses a (...) number of issues that, taken together, render this assumption fallacious. (shrink)

In the current digital environment, people can visit every corner of the world without leaving their homes. New media technology compresses distance and time, but it also subverts the traditional mode of audience presence. Many traditional, offline content expression modes are also moving toward the digital field, and digital art is among them. Digital new media is a new art form that requires its audience to have a new media literacy; this literacy is necessary for esthetic (...) experience and for audience participation. At present, the relatively lack of objective methodology for scientific research on aesthetic and media literacy has limited our current understanding. Therefore, we need to develop a new model and conduct empirical research with college students as the audience. Empirical research was conducted with an audience of college students. The study had the following purposes: to add a new dimension to the esthetic model, namely new media literacy, to align the model with the current digital environment, and to test the moderating effect of new media literacy on esthetic emotion as represented by interest and confusion. The experiment verified the study’s hypothesis that higher new media literacy was associated with higher esthetic interest and lower confusion. By contrast, has a substantial influence on the cognitive processes in humans, lower new media literacy was associated with lower esthetic interest and higher confusion. New media literacy is an essential quality for contemporary audiences. This knowledge may be useful for effective design. It provides a traditional and favorable learning environment and empirical reference for the subsequent improvement of digital aesthetics and media literacy. (shrink)

In many ways, digital practices have precipitated remarkable changes in the global accessibility of art. However, the digital revolution has also radically influenced the conservation processes surrounding art, including archiving, preserving, and remembering. This paper explores the conservation of digital artworks for the future benefit of culture, with particular peference to creators and viewers of art, as well as participants in interactive artworks. More specifically, this paper focuses on the philosophical and technical approaches adopted by creators, conservators, (...) and philosophers involved in the preservation of variable media artworks. Issues of programming, interoperability between archival systems, and enhanced public access increasingly inform the design of digital archives. Indeed, the continuously shifting technological landscape—marked by the centrality of digital technologies to everyday life—problematizes the preservation of digital art through mainstream museological paradigms. Part of this analysis of digital art conservation will be drawn from the archival philosophies of Boris Groys and Rick Prelinger. (shrink)

In the passage of time from the 1960s to the 1970s, the Brazilian artist Waldemar Cordeiro developed his first works in computer art by applying the mathematical concept of “derivative function.” Around the same time, he organized and took part in exhibitions, and composed a series of essays envisaging that the use of digital resources would become an inevitable process for the future of information reception and artistic communication. A closer look at Waldemar Cordeiro's production, both artistic and theoretical, (...) after almost 50 years of his first forays into the field of art and technology, is an excellent opportunity not only to revisit his trajectory, but to rewrite the history of digital art and our conception of it, locating Brazil and Latin America as situated centrally, not peripherally, in relation to the European and North American narratives. Drawing from theorists in the field of informational esthetics as well as scholars in the field of media such as Arlindo Machado and Vilém Flusser, this article seeks to demonstrate, through the analysis of Waldemar Cordeiro's theoretical–artistic productions, the relationship between his work, the field of cybernetics, and his utopian and social vision of artistic production. (shrink)

This article takes Afrofuturism as a model for addressing the concerns for digital and technology arts practice in Africa. The focus is on a mechanism for decentralization of a centralized western worldview. Cyberfeminist notions from Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’; propositions for an African Science Fiction; and Bouriaud’s ‘Radicant’ are additionally taken into account to reflect similar mechanism in addressing the mechanisms of decentralization. All these act as speculative methods, which are applied to thinking about the concerns that come with contemporary (...) Globalization. The aim is to rethink these issues in globalisaton, particularly with regard to creative and cultural practice with communication technologies emanating from Africa. (shrink)

Summary In this paper, the author shares his thoughts about the precedents, process, and significance of a series of “digital montage” artworks that he originated during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, he talks about the indebtedness of these works to Gestalt theory, and particularly their use of what is sometimes known as “laws of seeing,” “unit-forming factors,” or inherent “grouping tendencies.”.

When experienced in-person, engagement with art has been associated—in a growing body of evidence—with positive outcomes in wellbeing and mental health. This represents an exciting new field for psychology, curation, and health interventions, suggesting a widely-accessible, cost-effective, and non-pharmaceutical means of regulating factors such as mood or anxiety. However, can similar impacts be found with online presentations? If so, this would open up positive outcomes to an even-wider population—a trend accelerating due to the current COVID-19 pandemic. Despite its promise, this (...) question, and the underlying mechanisms of art interventions and impacts, has largely not been explored. Participants were asked to engage with one of two online exhibitions from Google Arts and Culture. With just 1–2 min exposure, both improved negative mood, state-anxiety, loneliness, and wellbeing. Stepdown analysis suggested the changes can be explained primarily via negative mood, while improvements in mood correlated with aesthetic appraisals and cognitive-emotional experience of the exhibition. However, no difference was found between exhibitions. We discuss the findings in terms of applications and targets for future research. (shrink)

In Third Digital Documentary: A Theory and Practice of Transmedia Arts Activism, Critical Design and Ethics Anita Chang offers a theory and methodology of transmedia arts activism within the technocultural and sociopolitical landscape of expanded documentary production, distribution, reception and participation. Through a detailed analysis of her transmedia project on indigenous and minority language endangerment and revival that consists of the feature-length documentary Tongues of Heaven, and the companion web application Root Tongue: Sharing Stories of Language Identity and Revival, (...) she reveals the layers and depths that comprise a critical arts practice when confronted with complex sociopolitical issues while working with multiple communities across territorial/national boundaries. In the context of the growing field of transmedia documentaries, Chang discusses the potentials and benefits of a critical design practice and production ethics that can transform this field to pilot new collaborations in documentary and digital media platforms towards a third digital documentary. (shrink)

BackgroundPsychotherapy interventions increasingly utilize digital technologies to improve access to therapy and its acceptability. Opportunities that digital technology potentially creates for art therapy reach beyond increased access to include new possibilities of adaptation and extension of therapy tool box. Given growing interest in practice and research in this area, it is important to investigate how art therapists engage with digital technology or how practice might be safely adapted to include new potential modes of delivery and new arts (...) media.MethodsAn integrative review of peer-reviewed literature on the use of digital technology in art therapy was conducted. The methodology used is particularly well suited for early stage exploratory inquiries, allowing for close examination of papers from a variety of methodological paradigms. Only studies that presented empirical outcomes were included in the formal analysis.FindingsOver 400 records were screened and 12 studies were included in the synthesis, pertaining to both the use of digital technology for remote delivery and as a medium for art making. Included studies, adopting predominantly qualitative and mixed methods, are grouped according to their focus on: art therapists’ views and experiences, online/distance art therapy, and the use of digital arts media. Recurring themes are discussed, including potential benefits and risks of incorporating digital technology in sessions with clients, concerns relating to ethics, resistance toward digital arts media, technological limitations and implications for therapeutic relationship and therapy process. Propositions for best practice and technological innovations that could make some of the challenges redundant are also reviewed. Future directions in research are indicated and cautious openness is recommended in both research and practice.ConclusionThe review documents growing research illustrating increased use of digital technology by art therapists for both online delivery and digital art making. Potentially immense opportunities that technology brings for art therapy should be considered alongside limitations and challenges of clinical, pragmatic and ethical nature. The review aims to invite conversations and further research to explore ways in which technology could increase relevance and reach of art therapy without compromising clients’ safety and key principles of the profession. (shrink)

Farah Nayeri addresses the difficult questions plaguing the art world, from the bad habits of Old Masters, to the current grappling with identity politics. For centuries, art censorship has been a top-down phenomenon--kings, popes, and one-party states decided what was considered obscene, blasphemous, or politically deviant in art. Today, censorship can also happen from the bottom-up, thanks to calls to action from organizers and social media campaigns. Artists and artworks are routinely taken to task for their insensitivity. In this new (...) world order, artists, critics, philanthropists, galleries and museums alike are recalibrating their efforts to increase the visibility of marginalized voices and respond to the people's demands for better ethics in art. But what should we, the people, do with this newfound power? With exclusive interviews with Nan Goldin, Sam Durant, Faith Ringgold, and others, Nayeri tackles wide-ranging issues including sex, religion, gender, ethics, animal rights, and race. By asking and answering questions such as: Who gets to make art and who owns it? How do we correct the inequities of the past? What does authenticity, exploitation, and appropriation mean in art?, Takedown provides the necessary tools to navigate the art world"--Publisher's description. (shrink)

Drawing on an extensive yet concise review of the history of cross-cultural aesthetics, the volume presents the scientists and artists working in the new world of transformative arts.

In this reply to my reviewers, I touch upon Husserl’s notion of fantasy. Whereas Kant positions fantasy outside the scope of his own work, Husserl brings it back. The importance of this notion lies in freeing imagination from the tight link to images, as for Husserl imagination is an activity that functions as a “quasi perception.” Ihde and Stiegler enrich Husserl’s analysis of imagination with various aspects of technology: Ihde shows how changes in the technologies that mediate our imagination will (...) necessarily change our imagination; Stiegler broadens Husserl’s analysis of retention. The two theories can be combined into a new understanding of subjectivity that is modeled as layers. Some layers can be performed by AI. The second part deals with the question of whether AI can be imaginative. Traditionally, imaginative creativity is associated with art. Bioart and AI art are brought as examples of a new definition of art, according to which art is the arrangement of materials in a way that produces a meaning. This definition does not refer specifically to creativity. In both forms of art, the biological/artificial and the human cooperate so that the former arranges the materials and the latter produces the meaning, albeit this division of labor is not clear-cut. The result is a co-shaping process. My conclusion is that algorithms can be considered creative by human standards, but this entails a new mode of imagination that is co-shaped and co-shared by humans and algorithms. The layer paradigm explains how such co-shaping works in practice. (shrink)

The article considers the possibility of using digital scientific art as a tool for philosophical and aesthetic cognition. On the example of games of cellular automata and from the point of view of the paradigm of synergetics, a large-scale analogy of the dynamics of multi-element distributed systems of various natures is revealed. The question is raised about the nature of beauty, which is interpreted as a fundamental cosmic phenomenon. The concept of protoconstruct is viewed as a mental object, the (...) properties of which are transferred to the objects and phenomena under study. As an example of digital protoconstructs, the article discusses the so-called cellular symmetroids. Cellular symmetroids can be considered from the point of view of scientific art as art objects. At the same time, they represent a deep ontological metaphor. A unique property of cellular symmetroids is spontaneous destruction and transition to quasi-chaotic dynamics. This feature can be linked to the idea of historical time, which is very unusual for mathematical objects. Mathematical structures that arise as a result of calculations according to this model are completely unique and inimitable, like the internal states of the soul or psyche of a thinking subject. At the same time, they are to the same extent determined by the previous state. Integrity, internal unity are inherent not only in symmetric structures but also in the chaos that is born after them, which, in contrast to stereotypical statistical intuitive ideas, is deterministic. However, such an abstract digital art, based on the unconventional mathematics of dynamic chaos, is an accurate ontological metaphor, a visualization of the eidos of the beauty in their relationship with the cosmic logos and the nature of the original creative chaos. (shrink)

The processes taking place in modern science tend to integrate various scientific disciplines in studying any scientific phenomenon. This explains the search of methodology based on the techniques of different sciences involved in formation of the subject of research, which in this article is represented by the digital music art. Interpreted as a branch of music art with digital specificity, digital music art incorporates electronic music presented by specific, algorithmic, and electronic music. A signature characteristic of (...) class='Hi'>digital music art consists in its interdisciplinarity, which suggests the combined effect of separate parts of the system and leads to self-organization, which corresponds with the scientific tasks of synergetics. This substantiates the relevance for elaboration of interdisciplinary methodology for studying digital music art in the context of research mechanisms developed within synergetics. The scientific lies in the analysis of digital art through the prism of the qualities inherent to synergetics. The disciplines united by digital art (mathematics, set theory, probability theory, information theory, combinatorics, game theory, cybernetics, computer science, acoustics, sociology, communication, and biology) are interdisciplinary, which means that in ensemble with other disciplines they form a complex interdisciplinary knowledge of structure of digital music art. At the same time, the disciplines that comprise scientific framework of digital music art are attributed to different sciences: humanities, natural sciences, mathematics, social sciences, and technical sciences. In this context, the research of digital music art is simultaneously of interdisciplinary and multiscientific nature. The author established a peculiar impact of interdisciplinarity upon digital art, which generates the qualities inherent to synergetics – nonlinearity, disequilibrium, openness, chaotic nature, entropy, indeterminacy, and dissipation. (shrink)

Since technology has been entering into human beings’ everyday life, individuals established a deep relationship with digital technology, thus an embodied link between people and digital instruments has been born. This is particularly evidenced by recent literature about screen time (duration of time spent by the individual in using electronic/digital media like television, smartphone, tablet or computer), it significantly influences different human beings’ dimensions: physical, psychological and neurological functions. Impact of digital technology on human beings can (...) be considered as a result of syntonic functioning in order to improve different people’s life areas (e.g., work, social or intimate relationship, learning), while the dystonic relationship is evidenced as a result of human addiction to digital technology. The present study aims to provide a cognitive and social psychology perspective on how screen time is changing our existences, defining digital technology as a gift which people should be aware of in terms of positive but even negative consequences in everyday life. (shrink)

Throughout Iran and various countries, the recent calls of the “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” (in Persian), “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” (in Kurdish), or “Woman, Life, Freedom” (in English) movement call for change to acknowledge the importance of women. While these feminist protests and demonstrations have been met with brutality, systematic oppression, and internet blackouts within Iran, they have captured significant social media attention and coverage outside the country, especially among the Iranian diaspora and various international organizations. This article, grounded in feminist urban (...) theories of the Global South, analyzes the digital feminist placemaking movement in Iran. As the first counter‐revolution led by women, the movement utilizes digital art, graffiti, and protest movements to embody women’s solidarity groups and sympathy rallies. Our analysis employs various digital research methods, including social media scrutiny and the study of protest illustrations. Analyzing the digital feminist placemaking in Iran will enable us to compare the commonalities, differences, challenges, and opportunities between the minorities and majorities in the world’s countries. The outcomes of this research can help international organizations such as Amnesty International and the United Nations Agency for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (UN Women), as well as policymakers, institutions, academics, and NGOs, to highlight the various ways in which broader public participation could be encouraged in the process of digital feminist insurgent placemaking. (shrink)

[V]isibility is central to the shaping of political, medical, and socioeconomic decisions. Who will be treated—how and where—are the central questions whose answers are often entwined with issues of visibility … [and] the effects that media visibility has on the perception of particular bodies .In a documentary entitled Paris: The Luminous Years , writer Janet Flanner describes the intense friendship of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Both were inspired by Paul Cézanne and his retrospective at the 1907 Salon d’Automne—which, according (...) to Paris: The Luminous Years, marked in Janus-like fashion the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries in art. Flanner tells of the frequent visits between the two painters, where they “talked and talked … two or three months that they just spent gabbling, gabbling.” And from their camaraderie and gabble emerged someth .. (shrink)

In this response to Pieter Lemmens’ post-autonomist evaluation of the liberatory potential of digital network technologies, Kate Milberry finds the concept of pharmakon as a diagnostic to uncover what ails the worker in technocapitalism wanting. Through an exploration of Marxian concepts and critical theory of technology, she explores ways to augment political responses to capitalist exploitation in the digital age. Milberry concludes that it is not possible to change the sociotechnical foundation of contemporary life until we fundamentally alter (...) the capitalist social relations concretized in technology. This can only be done through adopting an ethic of care, that is to say: only through love. (shrink)

Many areas of contemporary art and culture in the United States and Europe can be shown to have a direct lineage to the rich history of the Western Mystery Traditions, rooted in ancient esoteric and magical philosophies of Greece and Egypt. Video mash-ups and audio sampling have inherited the cut-up methods of Beat poets and artists, who in turn were influenced by the Surrealists and their contemporaries. Early twentieth-century artists such as Austin O. Spare drew upon magickal practices derived directly (...) from renaissance practitioners such as John Dee’s use of The Key of Solomon and Giordano Bruno’s Art of Memory. Methods of employing graphical imagery for the purpose of accessing insight or influence from alternate realms continue to draw upon Gnostic and Hermetic philosophies of ancient Greece and Egyptian antiquity. We can easily see the persistent influence of these ancient beliefs and practices in the contemporary use of logos and symbols of popular culture as well as in contemporary art and music. (shrink)

How might experimental media art help theorise what falls by the wayside in the digital public sphere? Working in the years immediately following the launch of YouTube in 2005, some media artists centred their creative praxis towards the end of that decade upon rescuing, revalorising, and placing back into digital circulation audiovisual media formats and technologies that appeared aged or obsolete. Although there may be a degree of nostalgia behind such practices, these artworks articulate a cogent critique of (...) the drive towards constant innovation that was responsible for the invention and global expansion of cinema, but in recent decades has been responsible for its decay—or, perhaps more accurately, for its perpetual transformation. The article explores this 'media-archaeology' sensibility as a way of thinking about AI more widely: an approach that sees histories of media not as a linear, chronological search for origins, but as a critical recovery of artefacts lodged discontinuously in multiple layers of the past. Although digital technologies form a central part of the creative process of the artists considered in this article, their works also act as a critical conscience about digital change, asking what the so-called digital revolution is leaving out, and leaving behind. In so doing, it illuminates some potential positive and negative impacts of digital technologies' mediation of new forms of public engagement, whether in art, archives, or on social media. (shrink)

Most people encounter art images as digital reproductions on a computer screen instead of as originals in a museum or gallery. With the development of digital technologies, high-resolution artworks can be accessed anywhere and anytime by a large number of viewers. Since these digital images depict the same content and are attributed to the same artist as the original, it is often implicitly assumed that their aesthetic evaluation will be similar. When it comes to the digital (...) reproductions of art, however, it is also obvious that reproductions do differ from the originals in various aspects. Besides image quality, resolution, and format, the most obvious change is in the representation of color. The effects of subjectively varying surface-level image features on art evaluation have not been clearly assessed. To address this gap, we compare the evaluation of digital reproductions of 16 expressionist and impressionist paintings manipulated to have a high color saturation vs. a saturation similar to the original. We also investigate the impact of viewing time and expertise, two other aspects that may impact the perception of art in online contexts. Moreover, we link these dimensions to a recent model of aesthetic experience [the Vienna Integrated Model of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Processes in Art Perception ]. Results suggest that color saturation does not exert a major influence on liking. Cognitive and emotional aspects, however, are affected – to different extents for experts and laypersons. For laypersons, the increase in color saturation led to more positive assessments of an artwork, whereas it resulted in increased confusion for art experts. This insight is particularly important when it comes to reproducing artworks digitally. Depending on the intended use, increasing or decreasing the color saturation of the digitally reproduced image might be most appropriate. We conclude with a discussion of these findings and address the question of why empirical aesthetics requires more precise dimensions to better understand the subtle processes that take place in the perception of today’s digitally reproduced art environment. (shrink)

"This book offers a prophetic vision of art in a digital future.

This text is an attempt to describe a growing interest in transferring street art into digital art in the form of NFTs. By examining several urban values associated with graffiti and street art, it is possible to see how these phenomena affect new technologies. First, however, it is important to consider some street art NFTs and distinguish between their different types. We may identify three ways of presenting street art as NFTs: transferring the character to a different medium; assembling (...) a collection of street art NFTs in a museum-like environment with each piece having its own characteristics; writing street artistry into the wider metaverse. I describe five urban values of NFTs: preservation, accessibility, illegality, money, and uniqueness. In conclusion, it is clear that NFTs change how viewers may perceive street art. NFTs are supposed to be eternal rather than ephemeral, and they lose street art’s association with spontaneity and illegality as well as its critique of commercialism. Street art as NFT is just another form of profit-making and one of its new values is money. It is possible to notice artistic values as well. NFTs are marked by diversity, and have their own rules (such as the importance of movement or looping), which are impossible to implement in traditional street art. (shrink)

How might experimental media art help theorise what falls by the wayside in the digital public sphere? Working in the years immediately following the launch of YouTube in 2005, some media artists centred their creative praxis towards the end of that decade upon rescuing, revalorising, and placing back into digital circulation audiovisual media formats and technologies that appeared aged or obsolete. Although there may be a degree of nostalgia behind such practices, these artworks articulate a cogent critique of (...) the drive towards constant innovation that was responsible for the invention and global expansion of cinema, but in recent decades has been responsible for its decay—or, perhaps more accurately, for its perpetual transformation. The article explores this 'media-archaeology' sensibility as a way of thinking about AI more widely: an approach that sees histories of media not as a linear, chronological search for origins, but as a critical recovery of artefacts lodged discontinuously in multiple layers of the past. Although digital technologies form a central part of the creative process of the artists considered in this article, their works also act as a critical conscience about digital change, asking what the so-called digital revolution is leaving out, and leaving behind. In so doing, it illuminates some potential positive and negative impacts of digital technologies' mediation of new forms of public engagement, whether in art, archives, or on social media. (shrink)

Image in the Making examines the ways in which digital technology changes our understanding of and engagement with the visual arts. At the current stage of development in digital technology, we cannot always tell, just by looking, that an image was made with digital - versus analog - tools. But a case can be made for fully appreciating an image only in terms of its underlying digital structure and technology.