Art History: Digital Style....

[Shatterdome]

It has been awhile since i've participated on the forums here...or anywhere for that matter. Yet I thought this would be a great place to bring this up. It may have already passed in discussion, but I can't be bothered to break any flow I might have in doing a search.

I have been pursuing my honours BFA for the past few years and am in my final year. One thing that has been a challenge is to mediate my needs between digital and traditional painting as I see the merits to both, yet the professors at my school barely recognize photoshop as a painting medium.

Anywho, in my thoughts of "fine" traditional art vs digital one thing struck me.

Many fine artists who become famous, do so after they are dead. Even when they are famous durring their life, much of their work they did not show comes to light and becomes famous after their death. There are so many stories of bodies of dusty artwork being found by some "no name", which is then recognized.

I am curious how this will work with digital artists, as I have seen so many collections of good art , which will probably never be published and just live electronically.

I am not sure about you, but I have had CD-R's in perfect condition just fail to be read....waiting on my first dvd-r to do the same. Can we rely on 3rd party hosting sites ? Probably not....HDD's fail all the time, even if they are just sitting there....

I guess this is just food for thought mixed with some drunken rambling....

[nevermindjoker]

I graduated BFA major in Painting at the University of the Philippines, i believe that it's all up to the Artist decision on what will be your Art. Though in my academic years I remember, Painting traditionally is only part of learning and experimentation...somewhat an experience to give you possibilities of your vision (ideas), and you will actually realize that there are limititions depending on how you'll concretize your ideas (visions).

If you are going back to the history of Art, you will notice that every recognized Art in each time have their own contributions for development of Art.

I guess Artist had to invent something new to Art. regardless of the medium/ tools.

We are fortunate that we live on the time that there are these technology advancement wherein we can experiment more of these tools that are available to us.

these includes video, photography, computer etc.

so i guess we just need to work and have fun while doing our Art regardless of the medium. And hopefully be recognized.

I believe documentation is very important on this digital times, and it's not our problem. It will be, if your Art is not recognized. Somehow doing digitally and sharing it depends to your intention, if no one sees your Art then you need to restore it and later will not found due to errors of the disk hehehe.

I remember doing a mud painting, which my objective is to negate the way Art should be permanent and should be restored in our times. But I do have complete documentation of it (see attached picture below). So, it really depends how you want your Art be. And for me doing digitally is somewhat doing the mud paintings, but in pixels which bits and bytes electronic data hehe.

I hope I give you some insights, and I suggest you read some post-modern works, and our contemporary artist.

[Shatterdome]

I really like the concept behind those mud paintings, not just related to art, but also in relation to life in general.

I have heard the "bring something new to the medium" a lot during my time at school.

I agree that we are lucky as artists to be a part of the birth (basically) of a new medium, digital painting is like the invention of oils (or maybe acrylic is a better analogy).

Anyway it got me thinking in terms of, "what if picasso was a digital artist, would we lose his "blue period" pieces because he didn't back them up...." and led to this topic.

[nevermindjoker]

thanks shatterdome!

[Chris Saksida]

If you are worried about the lack of a physical existence, you could always make big good prints of your digital works and seal them; they will last many lifetimes that way; problem solved!

[Shatterdome]

Well I wouldn't say I am really worried. I think I brought this up just to get digital artists thinking.

I definitely have considered prints as a way of archiving. Still, even if you get an accurate print of your work, there are only certain works that we feel are "worthy" of taking the time and money to make a print.

Using Picasso's blue period as an example again, I doubt those are pieces that he would have wanted to "print" and in his case they were paintings he never exhibited and probably would never feel were worth printing, IF he were a digital artist.

It's just a topic I thought was interesting and wanted to hear what other people have to say.....my hope is we get an extremely reliable means of backing up digital data (without constantly buying new HDD's and transferring....just something you can copy your data to and put in a box) then this conversation will be moot....