1. 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

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

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

4. 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

5. aesthetics beautiful sublime uncanny...

6. 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

7. art: a short history 1300-1900: realist: (Giotto to cinema) art is representational 1900-1964: 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

8. 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?

9. 1550: vasari Gioggio Vasari, encyclopedia of artistic biographies art is about accurate representation

10. 1305: giotto

11. 1507: leonardo

12. 1895: the lumières

13. 2001: pixar

15. from pixar’s physical based modeling workshop, siggraph 2001

16. art: a short history 1300-1900: realist 1900-1964: modernist 1964-now: postmodernist

17. 1890: monet

18. 1915:malevich

19. 1950:pollock

20. 1962:albers

21. 2001: john simon, jr.

22. 2005: maeda

23. art: a short history 1300-1900: realist 1900-1964: modernist 1964-now: postmodernist

24. 1964:warhol

25. 1968:situationists

26. contemporary brillo art?

27. now:yes men

28. yesmen:identitycorrection

29. 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

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

31. 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

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

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

34. 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

35. 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

36. 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.

37. 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: