What is Digital Art? Warren Sack Associate Professor, Film & Digital Media Department affiliated faculty, Computer Science Department affiliated faculty, History of Art & Visual Cultural Department faculty, Digital Art & New Media Graduate Program University of California, Santa Cruz

outline a definition of aesthetics a definition of art a definition of digital media an example of digital media art

“aesthetics is for artists as... ornithology is for the birds.” –Barnett Newman (abstract expressionist) not!

define:aesthetics “…the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics has been created using a definition of aesthetics as ‘critical reflection on art, culture, and nature.’” –Michael Kelly, editor in chief, Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics

aesthetics beautiful sublime uncanny...

define:relationalaesthetics “Relational Aesthetics: Aesthetic theory consisting in judging artworks on the basis of the inter- human relations which they represent, produce or prompt.” –Nicolas Bourriaud

art: a short history : realist: (Giotto to cinema) art is representational : modernist: (invention of cinema to Warhol’s Brillo Box) art explores its manifest (sensual) properties 1964-now: postmodernist: art is defined by its nonsensual, abstract properties –Arthur Danto’s periodization

aesthetics of art realist: Does it look real? modernist: Does it provide an abstraction or an expression? Does it explore the essential elements of the medium? postmodernist: Why isn’t it (just) what it looks like?

1550: vasari Gioggio Vasari, encyclopedia of artistic biographies art is about accurate representation

1305: giotto

1507: leonardo

1895: the lumières

2001: pixar

from pixar’s physical based modeling workshop, siggraph 2001

art: a short history : realist : modernist 1964-now: postmodernist

1890: monet

1915:malevich

1950:pollock

1962:albers

2001: john simon, jr.

2005: maeda

art: a short history : realist : modernist 1964-now: postmodernist

1964:warhol

1968:situationists

contemporary brillo art?

now:yes men

yesmen:identitycorrection

what makes “art” art? institutions: design is all around you; art requires you to go somewhere special (e.g., a gallery or a museum) theories: an artwork articulates a “statement” in a larger conversation or discourse

art statements are double warhol: art & package design situationists: art & comix yes men: art & public relations godard: film as philosophy?

deleuze:thought & media “I wonder why we cannot treat, for example, Resnais as a thinker, Godard as a thinker...?... We can speak of the colors of the great colorists of cinema, Antonioni, Visconti, Godard; we might also speak of them as philosophers.” –Gilles Deleuze, lecture on “Cinema and Thought,” 1984, University of Paris 8

define:digital art digital art is art made with the means of computer science (hardware, software, networks: information and communcation technologies)

is it art or is it......computer science?

if there is no difference, then you likely have a piece of realist or modernist art. cf., Donald Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming

if it’s not easy to tell but there is a difference, then you likely have a work of postmodern digital art; cf., software art like Adrian Ward’s Auto-Illustrator parody of Adobe Illustrator

define:digital media Digital media is a name for arts and humanities computing. It uses the means of computer science, but should be different from computer science.

digital media should......question the fundamental concepts of computer science. –“The strong claim for aesthetic computing is that by introducing ideas andmethods from art and design into computing, new practices and approaches will emerge responding to new objectives that would not not naturally have evolved within computer science and engineering.” Roger Malina. “A Forty Year Perspective on Aesthetic Computing” in Paul Fishwick (ed.) Aesthetic Computing: