Let's Get Digital Part 1

Published: Tuesday, 30 July 2024

Some of the works presented here are interactive

I once went on an Outward-Bound expedition to Scotland. I was only a young girl (“wee lass”, they called me… which was odd and comforting at the same time), but I learned a lot. Primarily I discovered I don’t love jumping into freezing lochs or being helicoptered off mountains due to “inclement” weather… but I also learned about the Comfort Zone, and the area just outside your Comfort Zone, which they rebranded the “Adventure Zone”.

Old Masters like Botticelli are in my Comfort Zone: I’ve spent literally years studying such pieces. This week, we are going into my “Adventure Zone”, exploring the weird and growing realm of “Digital Art”. Digital art has not been part of the traditional core pedagogy [i.e. the teaching approach] of art history. In my classes, we didn’t analyze individual digital works or study the historical and cultural significance of digital art like we did with other art forms and time periods. At the same time, digital art has exploded into popular consciousness especially with the “crypto” boom and “NFTs”. So, it’s high time I go on this learning curve to deepen our understanding.

We’ll discuss exactly what NFTs are later, but firstly let me persuade you that they’ve been having a moment: auctions and events dedicated to this artform have produced record sales while attracting more buyers and the next generation of collectors. Cryptopunk 7523 sold for more than $11 million in 2021, Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days and Human One sold for more than $69 million and nearly $29 million respectively in 2021. Works by Matt Furie are performing within their estimates of $15-20,000 while the works of Monica Rizzolli are greatly exceeding her estimates ($400-600) by a few thousand. If paying exorbitant amounts of money for things is art, then digital art should fit in just fine :).

It is important to open the discussion of digital art, NFTs, their traditional role and potentially why it's unfairly presented to the world in isolation from all traditional aspects of this space and the global art historical narrative. To be able to do that, we have to go to the very beginning. I’m going to use the most expensive thing about me (my brain lol), and apply everything I was taught to observe, learn, and critique to demonstrate how digital art is different… but not as different as it is sometimes made out to be.

We’re going to do a few things today. First, an exploration of the history of digital art, an appreciation that the term has a much longer usage than “crypto”, and how the art world has previously dealt with the rise of new technologies. Then, I’ll run out of time, so next week, I’ll discuss what NFTs are, and how they contribute to the art world. We will look at lots of pictures that suggest perhaps the NFT space has more in common with the “traditional” art world than it first appears. Finally, I’ll contradict myself at the end, and suggest maybe the traditional and NFT worlds will stay separate after all.

Now, we’ve gone far too long without a picture, so here’s one:

So What is Digital Art?

As always, we need a definition. And, as always, the more you try to define something the more elusive it becomes. According to the Tate Museums and the V&A, digital art is a style of art that is made or presented using digital technology. It can range across a wide variety of mediums spanning from computer, generative and AI, robotic, kinetic, and net art, through to post-internet, virtual reality, and augmented reality art.

The term digital art was first coined in the early 1980s when computer engineers devised a paint program which was used by pioneer digital artist, Harold Cohen. If nostalgic flashbacks of hours spent on MS Paint as a kid (or an adult) didn't come to mind when reading this then your childhood was incomplete.

Notable digital artists and communities include Harold Cohen, David Hockney, Beeple, XCOPY, Daniel Arsham, Yuga Labs, Dmitri Cherniak, Rare Pepes, and yes Andy Warhol. He created 5 digital art pieces in the 1980s that were recovered from floppy disks in 2014 and then later minted into NFTs.

So, through this lens, digital art is primarily defined via the technology used. That does not actually tell us much about the art style: as technology advances, popular artworks are initially identified by their method or form rather than an all-encompassing term such as digital art. As is the case with all art periods, certain styles become emblematic of that movement and associated in the public mind with that technology (e.g. NFTs = “cryptopunk”). Over time, creative artists find new ways to use the technology to artistically express their ideas.

Historically, many institutions rejected any new form of medium UNTIL they became an established art form. Some never make it: collage, performance and video art still struggle. Some forms get there, but take time: the term “impressionism” was originally used as a derogatory insult by an art critic: Louis Leroy looked at Monet’s latest landscape titled Impression, Sunrise, and immediately tweeted “These artists don’t impress me! #Impressionism #SalondesRefusés".

New Tech and New Art Forms

If digital art is new tech, then the art world has dealt with this before, as technological advancement breeds artistic creativity. An easy historical parallel to crypto and NFTs today is the Industrial Revolution and photography. Starting as early as the late 19th Century, photography struggled to gain credibility as an art form, but now has established categories at auctions, exhibitions and fairs.

Photography is a personal interest of mine, and a case study of the phenomena mentioned above. Photography is primarily a technology, rather than an art form in itself. Photography has a deep history in the scientific world (makes sense considering most of the process and production was rooted in a series of chemical reactions, and trial and error) to further the study and understanding of this knowledge field, and the historical documentation of discoveries, events, crime, people, etc.. As artists began to use the new technology, the first art styles became what was commonly thought of as “photographic art”, but later artists found new uses of the tech.

The tech at the time primarily meant most photographs were black and white. The development of color photography and single hue films (like blue and brown) permitted aesthetic choice for photographers depending on the material they were producing the photograph on (glass, silverplate, film, etc). What initially was a technical side effect and limitation transformed into its own iconic art style and “look” still popular to this day.

Artistic styles can even lead to non artistic purposes. Photography changed the game for portraiture. It was able to capture the likeness of individuals in so much detail painting could no longer compete. Portrait painting and photography, primarily reserved for the echelons of society to reflect wealth and status, was then commodified for government purposes in mass identity profiling and tracking through photo ID, which has nowadays developed into facial recognition technology.

Photography is a template for how art evolves: It is safe to say the process of developing photos and their subjects was different in the late 1800's to the 1950's to today. If we follow the definition that digital art is "art made or presented using digital technology", then any form of photography taken with a digital camera, or is presented on a screen or any other form of digital tech can be considered digital art. Whereas photographs pre-1970's definitely do not constitute digital art due to the technology used to produce and develop the medium at the time.

Photographs later manipulated in post-production can be considered digital art if used in digital software, whereas a photograph manipulated with physical material like pen and ink, or even paint, is then mixed media. This is because they no longer represent an honest reflection of reality and truth to how things appeared in that moment. It is a fine line that garners much debate. Currently, auction houses keep them in independent categories; however, if you look at some of the lots in the digital art auctions they contain photographic elements.

Conclusion

New art forms like digital art or photography are meant to be different and break from the herd, but it's not so different to fully lose the concept of what art is and what qualifies as art. If artists didn't experiment with new technology and find new ways to produce art, some of the most famous works or well-known artists probably wouldn’t exist today. What would we have today if the scientific nature that was primarily used in photography wasn’t trialed by Dorothea Lange to humanize subjects or Ansel Adams to capture the essence of the natural landscape of North America?

That’s all we have time for this week. Hopefully you now have an understanding of the historical context of digital art, how art styles rise from new technology, and why I dislike freezing Scottish lochs. Digital art has a much longer history than “NFTs”, and the art world has dealt with the rise of new technologies many times before. Next week, we’ll have (lots) more pictures to build on what we've learned to show more formally how the NFT space has more in common with the “traditional” art world than it initially appears (teaser: OSF’s Super Fan NFT is basically Van Gogh’s Night Cafe). Also, I’ll contradict myself by saying maybe the traditional and NFT worlds will stay separate after all, and how that's not necessarily a bad thing. See you then!

The chief object of the Group is to present in frequent shows what it considers the best contemporary photography of the West; in addition to the showing of the work of its members, it will include prints from other photographers who evidence tendencies in their work similar to that of the Group.

Group f/64 limits its members and invitational names to those workers who are striving to define photography as an art form by simple and direct presentation through purely photographic methods. The Group will show no work at any time that does not conform to its standards of pure photography. Pure photography is defined as possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form. The production of the "Pictorialist," on the other hand, indicates a devotion to principles of art which are directly related to painting and the graphic arts.

The members of Group f/64 believe that photography, as an art form, must develop along lines defined by the actualities and limitations of the photographic medium, and must always remain independent of ideological conventions of art and aesthetics that are reminiscent of a period and culture antedating the growth of the medium itself.