New World: Exploring the aesthetics of digital art a Feature by DREiMs (David Dreimann) Over the past decade we have witnessed the birth of a new medium in visual art. It has been neglected, abused, and confused yet no one has really been prepared to discuss or define it. DREiMs explores the possiblity of digital art to become something more than what it has been professed to be by the 21st century. Digital Art of the 21st century will be the equivalent of photography and cinema (radio and TV) in 20th. It will effect many current concepts from animation to print. Digital expressionism will also give birth to new concepts; virtual worlds where the viewer will not only look at an artist's creation, they will experience it; seeing, smelling, feeling, and interacting with an expressionistic world, or the impressions of the creator. It will vent the re-birth of forgotten concepts such as aural and visual poetry. We have the technology but we are ignoring what it can do; closed minded to the concept that computers, digital technology, is the art of the future. This article focuses on the specific digital medium of static visual art and its printed counter parts. I gladly welcome feedback, debate, contribution, and wistfully hope that someone out there will read this and say "He's got some good ideas...shame he doesn't have the financial backing to explore them... 'coz if he did he'd probably get a lot of publicity and recognition...I have a big company that could use publicity/I work for the Victorian Government and we provide grants and funding for this sort of thing...I'll organised to meet this individual and discuss the prospect of sponsorship". Hopefully, if I have time, I'll branch out into the discussion of other digital mediums soon. The purpose of digital art is not to copy the aesthetics of other artistic mediums. Just as photography, film, painting, sculpture, and silk screening exist with their own individual aesthetics, so does digital. One of the greatest follies of modern computer art is its attempt to disguise the fact that it has been created on a computer. This is done by placing the highest importance on the 'realism' of an image and is usually an attempt to make the work look like a photograph. This style of digital art has become standard. It has become a cliche and has caused people to ignore so many things which digital art is capable of. Impressionism, Fauvism, and Expressionism taught us that art is not about mimicking reality, it is about conveying your perception of it. You do not see a painter trying to hide the direction and texture of their brush strokes or the thickness of their paint. Rather, they embrace this as an important part of their medium. Equally, no attempt should be made to hide the aesthetics of printed digital art. Features such as pixel size and colour compression should be embraced not hidden. The Bretch concept of theater; that people should be aware they are in a theater; to only used what is needed to convey a message; should be applied to digital art. One of the most beautiful aspects of the large scale printed digital medium is the ability to perceive an image from a distance as a whole, then to be able to approach it seeing it as parts, and finally being able to see the very pixels that make up the images. The arrangement and colours of dots and pixels in a printed digital piece are akin to the texture of the brushstrokes or directional splatter of paint on canvas and should be appreciated and treated with the same respect. These aesthetics can be used in expression and creation, by placing low DPI images in contrast to higher DPI images, and low compressed colours in contrast to higher ones. Hopefully one day we will be able to look at a newspaper under a magnifying glass, or place our eyes right up to a screen and see something more than 'just dots'. Created on Mon, 22 Sep 1997 and last modified on Wed, 10 Dec 1997.

LOUDonline - http://www.loud.net.au - Fri, 10 Apr 1998