The integration of digital technologies has, over the last fifty years or so, gradually made artistic practices evolve, even if the majority of artists still express themselves with more traditional supports and materials such as canvas, paper, earth or metal. In order not to fall into the confusion, how can we define digital arts? To answer, here is MJM Graphic Design’s opinion on the question.
According to MJM Graphic Design, it turns out that the beginnings of computer technology in the 1960s coincided with the decompartmentalization of artistic categories that allowed the advent of what are called installations, situations and other artistic environments where sound, image, video and different artistic supports are mixed. This movement of decompartmentalization will greatly promote the emergence of free arts which, by their very nature, are also multi-media and multimedia.
If we agree to define art as a language and a means of human expression that allows us to express what other languages cannot necessarily do, digital art is a particular artistic category that uses the specificities of the digital language. The digital before becoming a culture with the explosion of the internet and its uses is first a binary language composed of 0 and 1.
Innovations induced by digital media and tools
It is a constant in the digital proposes the break with the oldest techniques. One of the great breaks is undoubtedly the interactivity that finally allows the spectator to become fully involved in the work. It is therefore more towards what we will call the art of interfaces that artists will turn to. The idea is to be able to amplify, increase and transform the perception we have of the world by being immersed in a universe that mixes different physical or virtual spaces.
This is the crowning achievement of what we call virtual reality or augmented reality environments, which today constitute the main categories of digital art. Let us recall that from 1994 to the beginning of the web many artists in the United States explored the possibilities of virtual reality work as a work called Osmose. An artistic experiment that proposed a virtual navigation rhythmed by breathing through a visiocasque is a combination full of sensors.
Artists now have new tools at their disposal
Gone are the days of brushes and the sculptor’s chisel. We have to make room for different materials such as sensory sensors, stereoscopic helmets, three-dimensional databases and cybernetic towers. So the artist has to immerse himself in an increasingly complex digital toolbox combining both hardware and software. With the world of software, the possibilities offered by artificial intelligence are incredible.
MJM Graphic Design is of the opinion that digital, perhaps, is giving new frontiers to art that in a way has been going around in circles since the end of the great 20th century artists and the advent of what we call postmodernity. The arrival of digital technology is undoubtedly a major revolution in art as it is in human societies. It is therefore quite logical that artists should seize the opportunities offered by the new technologies.
