Digital Fine Art
by Timothy Warnock // tim at artexploit.com // work in progress
The Ultimate Mixed Media and the Future of Fine Art
The term “digital fine art” is a misnomer. While it refers to an emerging discipline of creating art in digital form (a very real and prevalent practice), the classification of fine art as “digital” is nonsensical. More importantly, this very real practice of “digital fine art” represents an emerging discipline of art that whether you like it or not, is in fact the very future of fine art. The good news is you are at the forefront of an emergence of an entirely new era in fine art and collecting.
What is your medium?
This question is becoming increasingly difficult for me to answer. Every work tends to be completely different. Consider, for example, a recent piece that involved a large charcoal on newsprint, a simple pastel painting, both scanned in a high-resolution format, then layered with an assortment of photographs, then painted over with a Wacom tablet through software — eventually no traces of the original layers are visible. Additional layers are added changing the hue and color characteristics until it perfectly matches the intent I had in mind. And still, even more layers are painted adding highlights and definition to achieve the desired lighting and aesthetic. It is not uncommon that I’m dealing with 6 to 10 different mediums.
Some clarification of terms
The term “digital” often refers to the processing and storage of information in discrete numbers (typically in binary). The important distinction is that “digital” refers only to discrete numbers (the numerical base of the counting system is irrelevant). Non-digital, or analog, refers to non-discrete, or continuous systems. Our conventional base-10 counting system is, in fact, digital. This discrete counting system has in no way limited us from representing continuous numbers in mathematics and science — something computers excel at.
So what we’re really talking about with “digital fine art” is a classification of fine art that is actually a mathematical visualization, something that can be represented, in entirety, with numbers. A digital representation of an analog systems is only limited by the ever-expanding power of modern computers. What happens then, when the computer representation of an analog system exceeds our own representation?
Try a simple experiment. Stare closely at your fingertip such that your fingerprint is discernible. Slowly move your hand away from your eye until you can no longer see a fixed pattern of lines and instead only a smooth fingertip. For most of us, we’re barely stretching our arm. You have exhibited the limits of your own eyesight, a very real limitation due to a very discrete number of photosensitive cells in your eye. An alarming bit of news for the critics: modern computers can map far more information in a single image then your eye can process. It is no longer the case that the computer loses information in image visualization, but rather, the other way around where the human eye loses the full spectrum of information that can visualized with a computer.
The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed.
~ William Gibson
Considering the History of Science, Technology, and Art
Paul Brown, in his essay “An Emergent Paradigm” said it best:
It’s reported, although probably via apocrypha, that Michelangelo was advised by his contemporaries not to use stone as a medium. It was not befitting an artist who should, of course, have been using marble. Three centuries later the Impressionists were reprimanded for using paint from tubes because, as everyone knew, artist grind their own pigments in order to create a personal palette. By the early years of our own century we find the Constructivists being criticized for using modern industrial materials like plastic and steel and reminded that real artists used stone. Duchamp and Schwitters were just two Dadaists who were scathingly attacked for their use of found materials instead of paint out of tubes like the more commendable of their colleagues. [2]
The lessons of history seems plain: the art mainstream is hideously reactionary and beware any creative soul who experiments beyond the boundaries they prescribe. [2]
We’re all occasionally Luddites, even when we don’t mean to be. The beautiful part is what happens next. In every case of new science or new technology, art follows.
Strangely enough, art has historically lagged in its acceptance of new technology, in particular with fine art. Consider photography or lithography, while early pioneers existed in both it took decades before being fully accepted into the fine art world.
Computer art has been with us now for well over thirty years. [1] Photography appears to be the most relevant model for the adoption of digital fine art, and yet digital art takes photography into a new dimension of existence.
Digital Art techniques have freed photography from its own finality. In the hands of a digital artist a photograph is just the beginning, neither real nor unreal. [1]
Modern computing is poised to take over fine art, an eventuality that is as unavoidable as death and taxes. What is fascinating to me, is that digital art unifies the entire history of man-made art.
The visual styles of art which we have accumulated over the last six hundred years of art making–that is, all the art movements of the past that were identified as fostering unique imagery–these styles can be integrated into one another to make Digital Art. In this respect, Digital Art is the ultimate Mixed Media Art. [1]
Massively Mixed Media Art
So how do we combine our oil painting, our pencil sketch, a series of photographs we just snapped, all into a visualization of data collected from a hummingbird flight? Better yet, we want it aesthetically pleasing, and yet inventive in its uniqueness as to overwhelm the audience into a momentary reflection of the boundaries of their own existence. This intersection of science and art is revolutionizing fine art.
Let’s be clear: this is the beginning of a new art movement. [1]
We are, at this moment in history, able to leverage fractal geometry to build mathematical models of nature. And yet we can also leverage the entire body of knowledge of fine art techniques to masterfully produce these visualizations in ways that will stand out in every art history book as a turning point into a new era of art making.
The Art of the Code
Beyond algorithmic visualization [Work in Progress]
The Collectors
What this all means to the collector is that we have new frontiers of art-making to explore and examine. It means that, here at the turn of another century, there is an emerging form of art that comes directly from the technological invention that promises to define the culture of this century. [1]
References
1. http://www.collectorsguide.com/fa/fa100.shtml
2. http://www.dam.org/essays/brown01.htm