Art and Technology: A Dubious Alliance in the Digital Revolution
- Janet STRAYER
- Mar 25, 2023
- 9 min read
Updated: Jun 30
Art and Technology: Friend or Foe?
Tool use and making art have been allied since ancient times. So why the bitter debate that recurs whenever a major new tool enters the established art scene? It happened with the camera oscura, used centuries ago and with photography more recently. The debate today concerns the digital revolution that has affected much of world culture. Challenging questions are raised about its authenticity and impact on visual art.
Digital Painting, AI, NFT: Is It Really ART?
Painting with pixels and electronics instead of with paint and brush: Is that art?
Art, from cave-painting onwards, has always been made by human hands using whatever tools and materials were available. Since that time, human brains have also used available technology to pursue artistic interests. Advances in pigments and paint formulae, along with tools like lenses, mirrors, grids, printing press, camera oscura (a darkened box with a convex lens projecting a vague image of an external object onto a wall), and modern cameras have captured the creative imagination throughout history.
So why the animosity towards art mediated by the computer? Because it's cheating? Because a machine only copies and cannot imagine or originate? Does the camera "cheat" by relieving the human eye and hand of the hours of dedicated labor required to construct a hand-painted artwork? Yet, photography has become an accepted art form. So has the much older art of printmaking. The printing press, like the computer or camera, is an intermediary machine that processes work directed by an artist. True, in traditional printmaking, like etching, the artist's hand guides the process, etching the plate, inking it, and running it through the hand-managed press in a skilled process.
Greater resistance occurs in reaction to computer-art than to these other forms of technologically-mediated art. This may reflect a longstanding "human vs machine" ambivalence or downright fear of computer algorithms and robotics overtaking and degrading our human capacities.
Does Technology Degrade Art?
Many art traditionalists publicly scorned as blasphemy David Hockney's book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (2001) about Renaissance masters' use of the camera oscura. Why such a vehement reaction? At that time, my art teachers at a classical realism art school were among the scorners. They affirmed that they were teaching us to create similar effects without"cheating" devices. Many classical realist painters do, indeed, have remarkable skill, and no one disputes this fact. Nevertheless, it does not diminish Vermeer's greatness as a painter to think he may have used a camera oscura. Why should it?
Artistic skill is undiminished by tool-use. Quite the opposite. Do traditionalists condemn Durer's famous use of a viewing-grid as an aid to drawing forms in foreshortened perspective? Artists have always explored new tools and new media as part of the creative process. I can imagine a cave painter's thrill to discover that carbon ashes made different marks when applied by stick, lump of fat, or fingers. The power of tools applied to creative visions can be expansive rather than diminishing art.
Computer-Mediated Painting: Is it Art?
Let me cut to the chase. We're well beyond the point of debating whether digital painting is or is not "really" art. It is. Painting with pixels is just as much art as is painting with traditional paint. Whether or not it's good art applies to both digital and traditional media.The computer provides tools that mimic real-world tools like brushes, paint thickness/opacity, and more. Painters who know the effects of different kinds of brushes have an army of them in the computer. From my perspective (as traditional painter, printmaker, and sometimes digital painter) , the skills involved in the two approaches differ more in technical aspects than in artistic-creative ones. I'm sure many painters love their own brushes and the feel of paints and would never exchange these for virtual ones, much less learn the technical features of mastering computer software for art-making.
Artistic Vision and Purpose
Artwork in both digital and traditional art media is defined by the particular vision and purpose expressed by the artist. Artists working in both traditional and new media explore and apply their own mix of principles of design, skill, spontaneity, and expressiveness. Their tools differ, but it's artistic vision and skill that matter in both. Digital and traditional methods can even mimic each another to some extent. Digital paintings with optical texturing can resemble actual paint; and real paint on a brush can be meticulously applied as pixels when up close (Chuck Close). The wonder, to my mind, lies in the ways these two approaches can enhance one another a continual exploration of artistic vision and purpose.
Here's a personal story that highlights some of the issues raised by traditional versus digital methods of painting.I was studying classical realism at a fine art academy in Toronto in order to learn classical painting techniques. At the time, these skills weren't considered valuable at my Vancouver art school. I knew my personal art was headed in a non-classical direction, but I wanted to learn these techniques to boost confidence in my skills and choices (not defaults). While learning classical techniques, I continued playing with digital painting, something I'd enjoyed doing as a break from the academy program.
A Personal Perspective
My very first solo show in Vancouver some years ago, Child Out of Time (see here) was of digital paintings. To me, it clearly reflected classical training put to imaginative ends. I chose to work in digital media at that time because it was the artistic technique that most closely reflected the source of inspiration for this series: an old monochrome photo of unknown children that was displayed, along with war memorabilia, in a tiny civic archive in Europe. It was a sad and dramatic experience for me. That experience filtered into my dreams and took hold, resulting in Child Out of Time, so that I also made of an art video with music and poetry excerpts fitted to the images (see here).
When making this digital painting, series I used the traditional rendering techniques, taught at the classical-realist academy, and applied them to pixels rather than paint. I blended and refined the many layers contained in a painting, knowing that the effect I wanted was of a timeless photo with no brush strokes. I did miss out on the direct, sensory contact of traditional painting with brushes and paint. But digital was the right technique to use given the image I wanted to create: a photo that looked like something real but could not have happened.
I had much to explain about my digital technique in those still early days of digital painting.
I was asked to give a public lecture and demo. I hoped at the time to illustrate the points I'm making now: that art is art, regardless of the tools. I'm not primarily a digital painter, but I've been attentive to how the digital art field has exploded in recent years.
Although I personally prefer the sensuous feel of paint and kinetic movement in making paintings, I routinely go back and forth into digital media for exploration and fun. It's also fairly easy and quick, to swipe, obliterate, and try several digital versions across layers of a digital work. It can trigger imagination faster (not necessarily better) than using actual paint to make many thumbnail sketches Here's an example: an optically textured digital painting (at left) beside an actual acrylic painting shows how you can explore different features of paint application digitally.
Current State of Digital Art
The digital wave has reached the public eye, with many enjoying digital art, despite the scowling rebuke of many traditional artists and critics. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has developed. Commerce, too, has swept in with NFTs . It's big. It's also confusing.
The critical question, for me, is whether the process of making art remains with the artist or with the machine. What happens when algorithms in a computer program, itself, are sufficient to produce the output?
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Artificial Intelligence (AI): Who IS the Artist? Who does the Creating?
AI can produce impressive results. AI programs can synthesize an enormous database of photography, paintings, calligraphy, fractals, texturized light refractions, and more. Even more impressive is that the algorithms now include programmed randomness in their iterations, permitting them to go beyond the images in their database and produce something unexpected. This "randomness" factor is important because it keeps a degree of unpredictability in the algorithms, similar to the human process in creating art. When computer algorithms are used in this way, advocates refer to it as "Generative Art" or "AI Art" (https//aiartists.org).
We can applaud the creativity that builds such computer models. The variety and sophistication of some Generative Art productions are amazing , like 3D holograms and visual compositions shifting within a given viewing field, with new developments generated.
Although I'm all for artists using new tools, I admit to a problem in assessing as "art" products that are entirely computer-generated.
How much of the signature artist's own intelligence, feeling, and intent is expressed or communicated in such a product? It's up to the viewer to decide if this issue applies even when the artist is the programmer and decision-maker in AI's final output (see Mario Klingemann's work).
How Digital Art Blasted the High-End Market
Sophisticated digital (AI) artworks now sell in the high-end art market for prices that can match or exceed traditionally painted works. But it's not a new kid on the block, with the history of computer-generated visual output and built-in randomness evident in the 1960's. It's interesting to see how this output has changed across decades.
Schotter (Gravel) by Georg Nees (1968) at the left starts with a row of 12 squares that gradually alters as the rows move downward (as the algorithm increases the rotation and random location of the squares). Vera Molnár's (1974) computer-generated work is beside it. Artists like Warhol did a well-known computer graphics series in the 1980's. The field has vastly expanded since then.
Few artists had access to digital possibilities at first, so art experimentation was limited. By the 1990s, personal computers and digital software revolutionized life for us all (for better or worse). Digital art became accessible to diverse creative people. Commercial digital art as well as some fine-art examples were displayed in Times Square electronic billboards in the 1980's. The use of digitized material also increased in art shown in museums (artists like Rauschenberg and others). Cindy Sherman's photo-manipulation rose to an artistic heights uniquely her own. Digital art today is featured in settings like Rutger's Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, as well as decorating commercial ventures. If you're curious, Mario Klingemann has an interesting article on creativity in the AI age in the American Scientist: Inside Your Creative Mind (July-Aug 2020).
In the 21st Century, when David Hockney's canvas paintings were the focus of multiple retrospectives worldwide, he was also enthusiastically using his Iphone and Ipad to sketch digital works. His digital works became the focus of multiple world-wide exhibitions, some displayed via actual phones and tablets mounted on museum walls. Validation of digital media has come from renowned museums worldwide, included in collections of the Whitney and MOMA, for example.
NFT Art: All the Rage
When I first heard the term, "non-fungible token"/NFT, I thought it was a mushroom or new football team. It's a term that has shaken up the art world and generated billions in sales. NFT means any digital item (visual art, music, video characters, social media posts) so labelled is unique and cannot be replicated (though it can be co-owned by share-holders). The product can be reproduced in photographs and prints (just like traditional paintings like the Mona Lisa can ), but there is only one NFT (like having the only actual Mona Lisa painting locked in your garage). Ownership of an NFT is protected by a securely digitized certification of authenticity that is tracked The NFT acts as a one-of-a-kind asset that can be bought and sold on secondary markets. Selling an NFT means you are selling the ownership of the artwork, not the artwork itself.
How did NFTs come to such commercial success? A little history helps us understand these NFT mushrooms. Financial engineering of cryptocurrency has a role. The first NFT entered the scene in 2014 with Kevin McCoy's "Quantum", a pixelated image of a hexagon, that changed form and colour as the image pulsed onscreen. With the advent of crypto-currency marketing of NFT in 2017, a series of "CryptoPunks", or simple digital characters, were designed by Watkinson and Hall. Initially free, they now sell for thousands. These rather unsophisticated works had a big impact in the NFT market. When blue-chip art auction houses and galleries ventured into this new marketplace, NFTs exploded into the highpend market. By 2021, NFTs gained world attention when Everyday by digital artist, Mike Winkelmann (known as Beeple) was sold at auction for nearly 70 million.
I'm more interested in the art than the marketplace. But if you're curious, anyone can create or collect works in the NFT arena with a digital wallet, cryptocurrency, and a fee paid for processing your digital artwork on any NFT platform. After purchase, these works can be sold and resold on secondary markets using cryptocurrency. Remember though, intellectual property copyright belongs to the creator, not the buyer. This means that if you think of making an NFT of someone else's work, ensure you have permission first. And if you bought an NFT, just as with any artwork, the actual Mona Lisa is the intellectual property of the artist-creator.
As for me, I'm leaving the computer now and going back to the easel. I'm interested in your comments for this post -- click to email me
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