digital art experience essay

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The Philosophy of Digital Art

The philosophy of digital art is the philosophical study of art that crucially relies on computer processing in its production or presentation. There are many kinds of digital art, including digital cinema and video, digital photography and painting, electronic music, literary works generated by so-called “chatbots”, NFT art, net art, and video games. For the full range of digital art kinds, the aim is to identify their essential features, ground their proper appreciation, and situate our understanding of them in relation to pre-existing debates in aesthetics. This first-order inquiry cannot proceed without acknowledgment of the enormous interdisciplinary and popular interest in digital media. Claims are frequently made about fundamental shifts in the way we classify, evaluate, and engage with art now that computers seem to be involved in every kind of cultural production. The so-called “digital condition” (Kittler 1999) is characterized by a loss of trust in the image, a new way of experiencing the world as indeterminate and fragmentary, and a breakdown of traditional boundaries between artist and audience, artwork and artistic process. If we are looking for evidence of the digital condition, we need to understand its conceptual structure. Here’s where the philosopher comes in.

Although technology-based art is viewed as the “final avant-garde of the twentieth-century” (Rush 2005), and digital art has been part of the mainstream art world since the late 1990s (Paul 2008), the philosophy of digital art is still an emerging subfield. Three seminal monographs, one on videogames (Tavinor 2009), one on digital cinema (Gaut 2010), and one on computer art (Lopes 2010), have been invaluable in laying the groundwork concerning philosophical questions about art and computer technology. Since these publications, further philosophical attention has been given to the digital arts, including the first published volume to focus on the aesthetics of videogames (see Robson & Tavinor, eds., 2018). It can be challenging for philosophers to keep up with the rapid rate at which digital technology develops. But a number of recent articles on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the arts show that philosophers are well aware of and ready to meet this challenge (Atencia-Linares and Artiga 2022; Millière 2022; Moruzzi 2022; Roberts and Krueger 2022). The body of philosophical work on AI art will no doubt continue to grow, as will bodies of work on virtual reality in art and Internet art. With this growth, we can expect to to learn a great deal more about the extent and character of the digital cultural revolution.

1.1 The Digital Art World

1.2 the analog-digital distinction, 1.3 digital art: production, 1.4 digital art: presentation, 2. digital images, 3. appreciating artworks in digital media, 4.1 defining interactive works, 4.2 display variability, 4.3 interactivity and creativity, 5. locative art, other internet resources, related entries, 1. what is digital art.

In its broadest extant sense, “digital art” refers to art that relies on computer-based digital encoding, or on the electronic storage and processing of information in different formats—text, numbers, images, sounds—in a common binary code. The ways in which art-making can incorporate computer-based digital encoding are extremely diverse. A digital photograph may be the product of a manipulated sample of visual information captured with a digital camera from a “live” scene or captured with a scanner from a traditional celluloid photograph. Music can be recorded and then manipulated digitally or created digitally with specialized computer software. And a film is now the product of an extremely complex sequence of choices between analog and digital processes at the stages of image and sound capture or composition, image and sound editing, color correction or sound mastering, special effects production, and display or projection.

The complexity of the digital cinema workflow draws attention to a further difference concerning whether reliance on the digital is restricted to the way an artwork is made or extends to the display of the work. A work may be made on a computer—say, a musical work composed with Sibelius or a play written in Microsoft Word—and yet meant for apprehension in a non-digital format—say, performance on traditional musical instruments or enactment on stage. Similarly, a film could be captured and edited digitally before being printed on traditional 35mm photochemical film for projection in theaters. By contrast, works that are purely digital include a film made and projected digitally—for example, Dune (2021), a piece of music composed and played back electronically—for example, the electroacoustic works of Gottfried Michael Koenig (see Other Internet Resources ), and a work of ASCII art—an image made up from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII standard of 1963 and displayed on a computer monitor.

An example of ASCII art:

More recent kinds of purely digital art include Instagram art and Chatbot fiction. An example of the former is Land of Arca (2023), which is made up of narrative images created by AI and then curated by the Instagram account’s owner, IRK. An example of the latter is any of the myriad science fiction short stories with which several literary magazines were recently deluged.

Each of the examples above incorporates a computational process, to some degree, in the presentation of the work. In many ways, works belonging to digital media stand in stark contrast to those made by completely analog means.

The classical account of the analog-digital distinction is found in Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art (1976). In fact Goodman’s account remains practically the only general account of the distinction. While David Lewis (1971) raises a series of objections to Goodman, Lewis’ alternative account applies only to the representation of numbers. And while John Haugeland (1981) returns to the general distinction, he effectively qualifies and re-frames Goodman’s account in order to overcome Lewis’s and other potential objections. A few philosophers interested in clarifying the concepts employed by cognitive scientists have recognized the need for a general account of the analog-digital distinction (e.g., Dretske 1981; Blachowicz 1997; Katz 2008; Maley 2011). But in this context, as well, Goodman’s account is the essential point of reference. In some ways, this is surprising or at least striking: As Haugeland points out, the digital is a “mundane engineering notion” (1981: 217). Yet the philosophical context in which the notion receives its fullest analysis is that of aesthetics. As is well-known, Goodman’s interests in this context center on the role of musical notation in fixing the identity of musical works. But a musical notation is also a standard example of a digital system.

On Goodman’s broad, structuralist way of thinking, representational systems in general consist of sets of possible physical objects that count as token representations. Objects are grouped under syntactic and semantic types, and interesting differences between kinds of representational system track differences in the way syntactic and semantic types relate to one another. Digital systems are distinguished by being differentiated as opposed to dense . The condition of syntactic differentiation is met when the differences between classes of token representations are limited such that it is possible for users of the system always to tell that a token belongs to at most one class. The condition of semantic differentiation is met when the extension of each type, or the class of referents corresponding to a class of token representations, differs in limited ways from the extension of any other type; so that users of the system can always tell that a referent belongs to at most one extension. Goodman provides the following example of a simple digital computer, a system that meets the conditions of both syntactic and semantic differentiation: Say we have an instrument reporting on the number of dimes dropped into a toy bank with a capacity for holding 50 dimes, where the count is reported by an Arabic numeral on a small display (Goodman 1976: 159). In this system, the syntactic types are just the numbers 0–50, which have as their instances the discrete displays, at different times, of the corresponding Arabic numerals. Both the conditions of syntactic and semantic differentiation are met because the relevant differences between instances of different numbers are both highly circumscribed and conspicuous. This means that users of the system can be expected to be able to read the display, or determine which number is instantiated on the display (syntactic differentiation) and which numerical value, or how many coins, is thereby being indicated (semantic differentiation).

Analog representation fails to be differentiated because it is dense. With an ordering of types such that between any two types, there is a third, it is impossible to determine instantiation of at most one type. Not every case involving a failure of finite differentiation is a case of density but, in practice, most are. With a traditional thermometer, for example, heights of mercury that differ to any degree count as distinct syntactic types and the kinds of things that can differ semantically. Similarly, for pictures distinguished according to regions of color, for any two pictures, no matter how closely similar, one can always find a third more similar to each of them than they are to each other. Density is a feature of any system that measures continuously varying values. That is, as long as the system in question is designed so that any difference in magnitude indicates a difference in type.

Returning to the digital, some commentators have questioned whether Goodman’s condition of (syntactic and semantic) finite differentiation is sufficient to distinguish the kind of representation in question (Haugeland 1981; Lewis 1971). John Haugeland, for example, argues that there can be differentiated schemes without the “copyability” feature that defines the practical significance of digital systems. Haugeland’s solution is to require the practical and not just the theoretical possibility of a system’s users determining type membership. In fact, however, Goodman himself would likely accept this modification. In a later work, Goodman explicitly states that finite differentiation must make it possible to determine type membership “by means available and appropriate to the given user of the given scheme” (Goodman and Elgin 1988: 125).

Whether or not a work of digital art is a work of representational art, and even with the most abstract works of digital art, there are layers of representation involved in the complex processes of their production and presentation. Most of these layers, and arguably the most important ones, are digital. Where there are analog systems involved, digital translation makes possible the realization of the values of the final work. This is perhaps best seen with paradigmatic cases of digital art. Consider the following two relatively early works:

• Craig Kalpakjian, Corridor , 1995. Computer-generated animation on laser video disc, in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The video leads us slowly down an empty office hallway that is slightly curved and evenly lit, with pale, blank walls and opaque glass windows.
• Cory Arcangel and Paul B. Davis, Landscape Study #4 , 2002. Installation. A “reverse-engineered” video game that aims to transpose our everyday surroundings onto a video game platform. The work “plays” on a Nintendo gaming system and displays a continuously scrolling landscape with the blocky, minimalist graphics of the Mario Bros. game.

The first of these works involves digital moving imagery that is entirely generated by a computer program. At the same time, the video looks like it was or could have been recorded in an actual office setting. The particular significance of the work depends on the viewer being aware of its digital composition while at the same time being struck by its photorealistic familiarity. According to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF MoMA),

Kalpakjian thus reveals the complete artificiality of the built environments we inhabit, and their aesthetic distance from more humanistic forms. (SF MoMA n.d.)

The second work involves imagery that was initially captured digitally. Arcangel & Davis began by taking 360-degree photographs of Buffalo, New York. They scanned and modified the photographs on their computer so that the images could be coded according to the graphics capabilities of the Nintendo gaming system, and in order to give the images the distinctive look and feel of the Mario Bros. game. Arcangel & Davis then programmed the landscape imagery to scroll continuously across a TV screen, as in the Mario Bros. game. Finally, Arcangel & Davis melted the chips in a Super Mario cartridge, replacing them with their self-manufactured chips so that their landscape “game” could be run on any Nintendo system. As well as all the ways in which Arcangel & Davis’s work relies on both the technology and aesthetics of videogames, there are clearly ways in which it deliberately removes or blocks certain key features or capacities of videogames, perhaps most notably their robust interactivity. Playing a videogame essentially involves the prescribed creation of new display instances of a work. But we do not “play” Landscape Study #4 , and its imagery is fixed by the artist. The kind of interactivity typical of videogames can also be found in artworks made without computers (see Lopes 2010: 49). But this type of interactivity is most closely associated with digital art because complex interactivity is so much easier to achieve with the use of computers. This suggests a high degree of self-consciousness in Arcangel & Davis’s decision to block the interactivity of their reverse-engineered videogame. From the perspective of the philosophy of digital art, such a decision highlights the need for further discussion of the link between the nature of the digital and the nature of interactivity.

What is it about the ways in which the works by Arcangel & Davis, and by Kalpakjian, are produced that makes them digital in an appreciatively relevant sense? Computer imaging depends on the inherent programmability and automation of digital computers. Digital image capture depends on sampling and subsequently on the near-instantaneous processes of discrete coding. None of this would be possible without a series of linked systems each with finitely differentiated settings.

At the most basic level, the myriad transistors in a computer are essentially tiny digital schemes, each with two types: the “on” and “off” settings of the transistor-capacitor switch. The settings are discrete and distinguishable, as are their compliance classes, of 1s and 0s. The ubiquity of binary code in computer processing is a consequence of the fact that a digital computer is essentially a vast collection of on-off switches. A particular sequence of 1s and 0s realized at a particular time in virtue of the requisite arrangement of transistors is a binary instance of a particular number, interchangeable with all other instances of the same number and not interchangeable with any instances of different numbers. The difference between instances of one number and instances of other numbers is strictly limited to the difference in the ordering of 1s and 0s. In other words, Goodman’s condition of finite differentiation is clearly met. In turn, the numbers can refer to other values, including the light-intensity values of an image. A computation simply involves the generation of output strings of binary digits from input strings, in accordance with a general rule that depends on the properties of the strings (Piccinini 2008). The modern (digital) computer encodes both input data and assembly languages as sequences of binary digits, or bits, and allows for the internal storage of instructions. This makes the computer essentially programmable in the sense that it can be modified to compute new functions simply by being fed an appropriate arrangement of bits.

A program is a list of instructions, and instructions are strings of digits. The modern digital computer has components that serve to copy and store programs inside the machine, and to supply instructions to the computer’s processing units for implementation in the appropriate order. The outputs of a system can be dependent on specific inputs often in tandem with the conditional if-then statements. This is what is involved in a computer executing conditional branching instructions such that it can monitor and respond to its own intermediate computational states and even modify instructions based on its own processes. Such modifications are dictated by an algorithm—the program’s set of rules and operations. It is the digital computer’s capacity for branching, due to its digital programmability, that allows for the kinds of higher-level automation involved in the use of imaging applications and sequential image-generation. Our artists, Kalpakjian, and Arcangel & Davis, do not have to enter the strings of digits for every basic operation of the computer that underlies the complex operations involved in describing and manipulating images. If they did have to do this, they would never finish making their artworks. Rather, artists can rely on open-source code, libraries, or commercial software that automatically and instantaneously supplies the lines of code required for the execution of their artistic decisions.

The imaging software with which Kalpakjian works allows him to generate architectural interiors in rich detail. Arcangel & Davis do not require as much from their imaging software given that they are manipulating previously captured and scanned images. The process of scanning the photographs, just like the process involved in digital photography, involves sampling and quantization of a visual source; assigning an integer, from a finite range, to the average light-intensity measured across each small area of source-space corresponding to a cell in a grid. This process involves averaging and rounding up values, and it involves measurement, or sampling, of light intensities at (spatially and temporally) discrete intervals. Some, indeed many, of the differences in light intensity across the source image or scene (and at different times, in the case of moving imagery) are thereby dropped by the process of digital image-capture. Among some media theorists, this fact has led to deep suspicion of the digitally recorded image, prompting the feeling that the digital image is always a poor substitute for the analog. Current digital technologies for image-capture and display have such high rates of sampling frequency and resolution that the values dropped in quantization are well below the threshold of human perception. At the same time, Arcangel & Davis’s Landscape Study #4 reminds us that digital artists may choose to exploit visible pixellation for particular artistic ends.

A digitally recorded image need not appear any less richly detailed or varied in color than an analog image. All the same, in the terms of D. N. Rodowick, whereas the analog photograph is an “isomorphic transcription” of its subject, a digital photograph is a “data-output”, with a symbolically-mediated link to its subject (Rodowick 2007: 117–8). This ontological divide—described by William J. Mitchell as a “sudden and decisive rupture” in the history of photography (1994: 59), is then assumed to have aesthetic implications: Rodowick insists that the “discontinuities” in digital information “produce perceptual or aesthetic effects”. Despite this insistence, however, Rodowick goes on to acknowledge that, with enough resolution, “a digital photograph can simulate the look of a continuously produced analogical image”. This concession would seem to work against any attempt to identify the aesthetic effects of pixellation, even if “the pixel grid remains in the logical structure of the image” (Rodowick 2007: 119). But if we are to interpret Rodowick charitably, he could be implying that ontology at least partly determines appropriate appreciation; even if a digital photograph can look just like an analog photograph, its (known) digital status affects which of its perceptible features are aesthetically relevant and how we appropriately engage with them.

The media theorists’ worry about the impoverished digital image primarily refers to the production of digital images with its reliance on sampling and quantization. But there are also analogous worries about the digital presentation of images, worries about deep structural changes to analog images once they are displayed digitally—for example, on a liquid crystal display (LCD) screen or when projected digitally on a flat surface. Of course one could simply be interested in investigating these structural changes without being particularly worried about them. This shall be our approach.

The traditional method of film reel projection has been a remarkably stable and entrenched technology, remaining largely unchanged for over a century. But digital projection has almost taken over, particularly in conjunction with the networked distribution of films. Although films’ audiences may not be able to see the difference on screen between analog and digital projection, their expectations are changing—for example, about what can go wrong in the presentation of a film. A deeper assumption that has not changed, one that is almost universal among film scholars, is that films fundamentally depend on an illusion. Cinema is the art of moving images and thus its very existence depends on our being tricked into seeing a rapid succession of static images as a persistent moving image. In the philosophy of film, there is a small debate about the status of cinematic motion—whether it really is an illusion as commonly assumed. An analysis of digital projection technology reveals new complexities in this debate but ultimately provides additional reasons to stick with the popular illusionist view.

Traditional and digital projection methods could not seem more different: the former involves running a flexible film strip through a mechanical projector; the latter involves a complex array of micromirrors on semiconductor chips, which, in combination with a prism and a lamp, generate projectable images from binary code. Nevertheless, both are methods for generating the impression of a continuously illuminated, persistent moving image from a sequence of static images. Compared with traditional projection, however, digital projection includes an extra step, whereby the images in the static sequence are generated from flashes of light. In order to generate each image in the digital projector, a light beam from a high-powered lamp is separated by a prism into its color components of red, blue, and green. Each color beam then hits a different Digital Micromirror Device (DMD), which is a semiconductor chip covered with more than a million tiny, hinged mirrors. Based on the information encoded in the video signal, the DMDs selectively turn over some of the tiny mirrors to reflect the colored lights. Most of the tiny mirrors are flipped thousands of times a second in order to create the gradations of light and dark making up a monochromatic, pixellated image—a mirror that is flipped on a greater proportion of the time will reflect more light and so will form a brighter pixel than a mirror that is not flipped on for so long. Each DMD reflects a monochromatic image back to the prism, which then recombines the colors to form the projected, full-color image. This image—if it were held for long enough on the screen—would be perceived as static. In order then to produce the impression of motion in the projected, full-color image, the underlying memory array of the DMDs has to update rapidly so that all the micromirrors are released simultaneously and allowed to move into a new “address state”, providing new patterns of light modulation for successive images.

The two-stage process of digital projection, by which the moving image is created from a succession of static images that are themselves created by motion, draws attention to the metaphysical complexity of the question of how movies move. In particular, one is unlikely to determine the status of the impression of motion that makes possible the art of cinema unless one can determine the status of the imagery that is seen to move. Given that motion involves an object occupying contiguous spatial locations in successive moments of time, a moving object must be re-identifiable over time. A moving image in a film, arising as it does out of the rapid display of a succession of still images, is not obviously a persistent object that can be seen to move. Then again, perhaps it is enough that ordinary viewers identify an image—say of a moving train— as the same image, for the moving image to persist (Currie 1996). Alternatively, the moving image could be thought to persist as a second-order physical entity constituted by a sequence of flashing lights (Ponech 2006).

The second proposal immediately runs into trouble with digital projection. If the traditionally projected moving image exists as a series of flashes of light, in digital projection, other “intermediate” objects must be granted existence—for example, the stable point of light consisting of the rate of flashes, and gaps between them, of a single micromirror on the DMD. At the same time, the moving image itself must be stripped of its existence since it does not consist of flashes of light. This is due to the fact that, in digital projection, there are no gaps between frames and so no underlying, imperceptible alternation of light and dark. This leaves the realist in the awkward position of claiming that the moving image goes in and out of existence with the switch between analog and digital projection technologies.

The first proposal, on which cinematic motion is a secondary quality, threatens to destroy the distinction between the apparent and the illusory. It suggests a way of reinterpreting any case of perceptual illusion as a case involving the ascription of secondary qualities. That is, unless it can be shown that there are independent means of checking that we are mistaken about genuine illusions. But even if this can be shown, a problem remains: While there may not be an independent check for the motion of an image, there is likewise no independent check for a genuine illusion of color. Given the contrived conditions of film viewing, there is more reason to think of cinematic motion as akin to an illusory, than to a genuine, experience of color. With the introduction of digital projection, the conditions are arguably even more contrived. For it is not just movement in the image but the image itself that is constituted by rapid flashes of light. And the technology involved is far less accessible than that of a traditional mechanical projector in the sense that one cannot, just by looking at the projection device, see (roughly) how it works. In this way, an analysis of digital movie projection serves to reinforce the traditional assumption that cinema is an art of illusion. In addition, however, the analysis suggests that the illusion at the heart of cinema is particularly impenetrable—akin to an illusion of color, and thus an illusion of a mere appearance that cannot be checked (Thomson-Jones 2013).

With digital movie projection, we begin to see the importance of understanding the technology of display for understanding the nature of digital art. Another way we see its importance is in relation to images displayed on LCD screens. According to Goodman, images are essentially analog. Nevertheless, there seems to be a way for engineers to circumvent the essential analogicity of pictorial schemes by using digital technologies for encoded subphenomenal discrimination. Arguably, finite differentiation can be imposed on the scheme of all possible images displayed on high-resolution LCD screens. As we shall see, this has far-reaching implications for the ways in which we think about and properly appreciate image-based art.

Both in his earlier and in his later work in aesthetics, Goodman commits to “a special relation” between the analog and the pictorial, one that is seen when we compare “the presystematic notions of description and picture in a given culture”. Given two schemes, S and S′ , where S consists of all descriptions or predicates in a language such as English, and S′ consists of all pictures, if we were told only of the structures of S and S′ , we could distinguish the pictorial scheme by its being analog (Goodman and Elgin 1988: 130). The special relation remains, Goodman claims, despite the possibility of a digital sub-scheme made up of black and white grid patterns all of which happen to be pictures. In such a scheme, the differences between patterned types that matter for the scheme’s being digital do not include all of the differences that matter for distinguishing pictorial types. Pictures are distinguished by color, shape, and size, which vary continuously; any variation in color, shape, or size potentially results in a different picture. When we impose limits on the differences that matter for distinguishing one grid pattern in the scheme from another, we are not interpreting the grid patterns as pictures; if we were to do so, we would have to treat them as members of a syntactically dense, or analog, scheme.

Goodman’s insight about grid patterns and pictures suggests an immediate difficulty for explaining the digital status of images displayed on LCD screens: Clearly it will not be sufficient to point out that such images are pixellated, and therefore made up of small identical building blocks that impose a lower limit on the differences between display-instances. Remember that pictures are defined by color, shape, and size, which vary continuously. This means there is going to be vagueness at the limits of types – even though the physical pixels of an LCD screen are such that there are gaps between the possible shapes, sizes, and colors that the screen can instantiate; and, there are a finite number of shapes, sizes, and colors that the screen can instantiate. Any means of discretely carving up the property spaces of color, shape, and size has to involve grouping into types what are in fact (subphenomenally) distinct shapes, sizes, and colors, some of which may differ less from adjacent properties grouped into other types. This makes it impossible always to determine unique class membership; hence, finite differentiation fails.

Pixellation alone, no matter the resolution, cannot account for images displayed on LCD screens belonging to a digital scheme; digital images qua images thus remain stubbornly analog. But perhaps a closer analysis of digital imaging technology can show that finite differentiation is met after all. Current technologies for sampling and instantiating light intensities group objective colors well below the level of phenomenal discrimination. For example, in the standard “Truecolor” system, a display pixel has three 8-bit subpixels, each of which emits a different visible wavelength with an intensity from a range of 256 values, yielding over 16 million objective colors. Such a large number of available colors gives the impression of a color continuum when, in fact, digital sampling technology has been used to carve up the objective color space into a disjoint series of wavelength intensities. On the one hand, from the fact that display pixels can be lit at intensities between and indiscriminable from adjacent discriminable intensities, it seems to follow that finite differentiation fails. On the other hand, precisely because digital technology involves microtechnology and metrology for subphenomenal discrimination between colors, the light intensity groupings that are expressed numerically as red-blue-green triplets (in, say, the Truecolor system) can be narrower than the objective color types that contribute to the resultant image scheme. The key is keeping the variations in the essentially analog properties of color, shape, and size small enough so that they cannot accumulate to the point of making a difference to image perception (Zeimbekis 2012). The types in the scheme of digital images are technologically segmented, transitive groupings of the same color-, shape-, and size-experiences. The carving out of a transitive sub-set of magnitudes has to occur relative to the needs of the users of the system. In the case of digital color, the types are classes of light intensities sufficient to cause the same color experience for normal human perceivers. The replicability of digital images is made possible by the gap between the discriminatory limits of the human visual system and the discriminatory limits of digital sampling technology.

Digital images can be replicated insofar as they are digital and thus finitely differentiated. They are finitely differentiated because they rely on subphenomenal sampling and display technology. In practical terms, replication depends on the use of binary code, even though this is not in fact what makes images qua images digital. Of course binary code representations are themselves part of a digital scheme. But the role of binary code in image-instantiation is just one of consistent preservation; preservation for long enough to permit reproduction. Despite the inherent replicability of digital images, it does not appear to follow automatically that artworks involving these images are multiples.

The SF MoMA is in possession of the original of Kalpakjian’s work, Corridor ; they control access to the video imagery. At present, the work is not available to be viewed: it cannot be viewed on-line as part of a digital archive or collection, nor is it currently on view in the physical space of the museum. The image sequence comprising the work could be multiply instantiated and widely distributed, but in fact it is not, nor is it meant to be. Similarly with Arcangel & Davis’s work, Landscape Study #4 : This work is described as an installation, meant to be exhibited in a physical gallery alongside an arrangement of printed stills, with a television connected to a Nintendo Entertainment System. Again, the image sequence displayed on the television could be multiply instantiated and widely distributed, but it is not, nor is it meant to be. Clips and copies of the landscape imagery are available on-line, but these do not instantiate parts of the work itself. By contrast, works of net art are instantiated whenever they are accessed by someone on-line.

There are many kinds of net art, including various forms of experimental on-line literature, conceptual browser art, and works drawing on software and computer gaming conventions. Extensive on-line collections of visual and audiovisual net art are rigorously curated and at the same time immediately accessible to ordinary Internet users. When it comes to the conventions of access and presentation, the contrast is striking between works of net art and works like those by Kalpakjian, and Arcangel & Davis. Perhaps a digital artwork comprising multiply instantiable images need not itself be multiply instantiable. At this point, the philosophy of digital art joins an ongoing debate about the ontology of art.

On the question of whether artworks are all the same kind of thing or many different kinds of things, ontological pluralism is often taken to be implied by the primary role of the artist in “sanctioning” features of their work (Irvin 2005, 2008; Thomasson 2010). A sanction can consist simply in, say, the painting of a canvas by a self-professed artist and the subsequent display of the work in a gallery. The artist has sanctioned those features of the work that make it a traditional painting. But what was once largely implicit is now often explicit: many contemporary works of art are defined by a set of instructions for their presentation (e.g., aspect ratio, resolution). We can find plenty of examples of non-digital works that are defined by a set of instructions, such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991). This work is given to a gallery to display by way of nothing more than a set of instructions for constructing and maintaining a pile of candies. Whether non-digital or digital, the instructions determine what is part of the work and what is not, and whether the work is singular or multiply instantiable. As a result, the instructions guide appropriate interpretation of the work. On this view, ontology precedes interpretation: we cannot properly and fully appreciate a work, for the work that it is, without a prior determination of what it comprises. This is a matter of contention, however. On another way of thinking, artworks just are objects of interpretation, and there is no artwork whose boundaries can be identified before we begin interpretation (Davies 2004).

The issue of the relation between ontology and interpretation is a complex and difficult one, but progress can be made on the issue through an examination of digital art practices. This is particularly in light of the high degree of self-consciousness with which many digital artists and digital art curators specify the features of digital art works. It is a common practice, for example, when archiving net art, to have artists fill out a questionnaire in order to specify which features of a work are crucial for its preservation—whether features of appearance, timing and motion, interactivity potentials and methods, linking to other sites, or hardware and software. When a work of net art is individuated by its imagery, say, the artist has chosen to make the inherent replicability of digital imagery part of the work. That this is a choice is suggested by the existence of singular works of digital visual art, like the examples discussed above. The question of whether the works by Kalpakjian, and Arcangel & Davis can function allographically requires further investigation (see D’Cruz and Magnus 2014). But if they can so function, the artist’s presentation instructions have a primary role to play in fixing, not just the art form (installation, movie, conceptual work, etc.) but the basic structure of the work – for example, in determining whether the work is singular and thus identical with a certain kind of physical display or multiple with no original display. Where interactive digital works are concerned, individuation is determined by a set of algorithms. An algorithmic account of interactive digital art suggests that, although the code is important for adequate instantiation of the work, it is the algorithm that specifies the crucial features of the work (Lopes 2010; Tavinor 2011; Moser 2018). Since the code is, ontologically speaking, less relevant than the algorithm, this account makes allowances for the variability that may be found in the code when an instance of a program is run on different kinds of devices.

Reflection on the kinds and significance of choices available to an artist contributes to a full appreciation of the artist’s work. For any artwork, appreciation begins with recognition of its status as a work , the product of artistic activity of some kind, and thus something to be appreciated as the achievement of an artist or group of artists. Most commonly, this achievement is understood in terms of the aesthetically significant effects achieved by an artist with certain kinds of tools and materials and in light of certain appreciative conventions. In other words, the achievement is always relative to an artistic medium. Returning to the case of an artist choosing what to do about the inherent replicability of digital imagery, another way of thinking about this choice is in terms of the artist recognizing the limits and capacities of their chosen medium. Images conveyed digitally are always replicable and so when an artist aims to convey artistic content through digital imagery, they either have to accept the inevitable multiplicity of their works or resist the tendency of the medium and somehow specify the work’s singularity in presentation. At a more fine-grained level, our appreciation of particular effects—of color and composition, expression, narrative structure, and so on—depends on the effects themselves but also on background acknowledgment of their degree of difficulty or innovation in the relevant medium. The production of digital art relies on the computer automation of many of the tasks, both manual and cognitive, traditionally involved in making art. The effects achieved by computer automation cannot be assessed in the same way as those achieved by traditional “hands-on” artistic methods. The terms of our appreciation, therefore, need to be adjusted in the digital age. This is certainly compatible with the continued relevance of medium-based appreciation, as long as we can make sense of digital media as artistic media (Binkley 1998). But there is a strong tendency in film and media studies to assume that the medium has absolutely no role to play in the appreciation of digital art.

Summing up this view, it supposedly follows from the fact that modern (digital) computers encode every kind of information in the same way—i.e., as a sequence of binary digits—that a digital artwork is no longer defined by its mode of presentation, whether in images, moving images, sound patterns, or text. A work’s display is rendered merely contingent by the fact that it is generated from a common code. By adding a particular instruction to the code sequence specifying a work, imagery associated with that work could be instantaneously converted into sounds or text, or just into different imagery. This possibility alone supposedly renders meaningless all talk of an artwork being in a particular medium and being properly appreciated in terms of that medium (Kittler 1999; Doane 2007).

Given the considerable effects of digital technology on artistic production, it is perhaps understandable that some commentators are inclined toward a radical overhauling of art theoretical concepts. But their arguments in support of such an overhaul are, at best, incomplete. We see this once we cite some important continuities between ways of making and thinking about art in the analog age and in the digital age. It has always been the case, for example, that “any medium can be translated into any other” (Kittler 1999: 1): Without using a computer, someone could manually devise a set of rules (an algorithm) for the translation of image values, say, into sounds or text. Moreover, a common storage and transmission means for (moving) imagery and sound is not unique to digital technology: As Doron Galili points out (2011), electronic image transmission going back to the late nineteenth century—in other words, precursors of the TV—relies on the conversion of both images and sound into electronic pulses.

Apart from these important continuities, the media theorist’s inference from translatability to medium-free art simply does not hold. That we could set about “translating” the imagery of Seven Samurai into a symphony does not mean that the original artwork lacks a medium; it is a film, after all, and as such, it has to be in the medium of moving images. The symphonic translation of Seven Samurai is not the same work as the 1954 film by Akira Kurosawa. This reminds us that, in deciding whether there is a digital medium, we must not reduce the medium to the artist’s materials, for it also matters how the artist uses those materials. Nor must we limit the constitutive materials of a medium to physical materials. The case of literature shows that neither the materials of an art form, nor their modes of manipulation, need be physical. The medium of literature is neither paper and ink nor abstract lexical symbols, but letters and words used in certain ways. There are, of course, many different ways of physically storing and transmitting literary works, including by the printed page, in audio recordings, and by memory (human or computer). But from the fact that David Copperfield can be preserved in many different formats, it does not follow that this novel is any less decisively a novel and, as such, in the medium of literature.

Just as with a literary work, the preservation and transmission of digital works in different formats depends on the use of a common code, but a binary numeric code rather than a lexical one. As we have seen, words and their literary uses constitute the medium of literature. In the same way, binary code, along with the information it implements, and its artistic uses constitute the medium of digital art. This allows for the possibility that the digital medium contains various sub-media, or “nested” media (Gaut 2010). For instance, within the medium of digital art, the medium of digital visual art comprises artistic uses of computer code specifically to create images. In technical terms, such uses can be referred to as (artistic) “bitmapping”, given that a computer ultimately stores all images (2D and 3D vector) as bitmaps, which are code sequences specifying the integers assigned to light intensity measurements in a pixel grid. The medium of bitmapping is thus distinguished by a kind of digital technology, but the kind used to produce just those items belonging to the traditional medium of images.

Once the notion of digital media is revealed to be no more confused or mysterious than the familiar notion of literary media, its irreducible role in appreciation becomes apparent. To take just one example, proper appreciation of films in the digital age depends on recognizing that digital filmmaking tools do not just make traditional filmmaking easier; they also present new creative possibilities and challenges. Given the maturity and mass-art status of the cinematic art form, it is easy to take for granted the medium of moving imagery; we may think we know exactly what its limits are, and we may even think we have seen everything that can be done with it. The digital medium is different, however, and digital cinema is in both the medium of moving imagery and the digital medium.

At first glance, it might seem odd to speak of “challenges” or “limits” in relation to digital processes, which allow for instantaneous and endless modification with increasingly user-friendly applications and devices. The high degree of automation in the process of capturing an image with a digital video camera, along with increasingly high image resolution and memory capacity, could make it seem as though digital images are too easily achieved to be interesting. Then there are the practically endless possibilities for “correcting” the captured image with applications like Photoshop. When we take a photo or video on our smartphones, an AI program automatically optimizes focus, contrast, and detail. Digital sound recording is likewise increasingly automated, increasingly fine-grained, and reliant on ever-larger computer memory capacities. Modifying and mastering recorded sound with digital editing software allows for an unlimited testing of options. In digital film editing, sequence changes are instantaneous and entirely reversible—quite unlike when the editing process involved the physical cutting and splicing of a film (image or sound) strip. Digital tools thus allow filmmakers to focus (almost) purely on the look and sound of the movie without having to worry about the technical difficulty or finality of implementation.

Rather than dismissing all digital works as too easily achieved to be interesting, medium-based appreciation requires that we consider the digital on its own terms. This means we must allow for the possibility that certain kinds of increased technical efficiency can bring new creative risks. For example, even though committing to certain editorial decisions does not entail irreversible alterations to a filmstrip, arriving at those decisions involves sifting through and eliminating far more options, a process which can easily become overwhelming and therefore more error-ridden. When we properly appreciate a digital film, part of what we need to appreciate is the significance of any scene or sequence looking just the way it does when it could have, so easily, looked many other ways. Similarly, when we properly appreciate an interactive digital installation or videogame, we are, in part, appreciating certain representations, functions, and capabilities of the input-output system, made possible by digital media. This is undeniably a form of medium-based appreciation and the medium to which we appeal is digital. It is only when we think of a digital film as in a digital medium that we can appreciate it as a particular response to the creative problem, introduced by coding, of finalizing selections from a vast array of equally and instantly available options.

The case of digital cinema is perhaps a useful starting point for work in the philosophy of digital art. Digital cinema is a multi-media art form, after all, involving 2D and 3D moving images as well as sound. It also has the potential for robust interactivity, whereby audiences select story events or otherwise modify a film screening in prescribed ways (Gaut 2010: 224–43). Many of the digital tools developed by the film and video game industries are now available more widely to artists interested in making other forms of digital art, including net art, digital sound installations, and virtual reality art (Grau 2003; Chalmers 2017; Tavinor 2019). In terms of how the use of these tools affects proper appreciation, there are important continuities between the filmmaking context and the wider digital art world. In addition, the philosophy of film is a well-established subfield in aesthetics, one that engages with both film theory and cognitive science in order to explicate the nature of film as a mass art (Thomson-Jones 2014, Other Internet Resources). For many of the standard topics in the philosophy of film, interesting and important questions arise when we extend the discussion from analog to digital cinema. There is a question, for example, about the kinds and significance of realism that can be achieved with traditional celluloid film as compared with manipulated digital imagery (Gaut 2010: 60–97). The philosophy of film can provide some of the initial terms of analysis for artworks in a broad range of digital media. At the same time, it is important to approach each of the digital arts on their own terms under the assumption that the digital is an artistically significant category.

4. Interactivity

More and more, contemporary artists are taking advantage of the dynamic and responsive capabilities of digital media to make art interactive. The experimental online literature, conceptual browser art, and videogames mentioned above all require user interactivity, but they do so to varying degrees. Therefore, if interactivity plays a distinctive role in the digital arts, there are good reasons to analyse the nature of these works more deeply.

Not all digital works are interactive, and not all interactive works are digital. However, since computers are inherently interactive, much of the early philosophical literature on interactivity arose from the emergence of computer art (also see Smuts 2009; Lopes 2001; Saltz 1997). The distinctive character of interactive digital art is best considered in tandem with the work’s ontology.

Before analyzing interactivity any further, first, consider the following description of the digital installation “Universe of Water Particles on a Rock where People Gather” (henceforth, “Rock where People Gather”) by TeamLab:

“Rock where People Gather” is reproduced in a virtual three-dimensional space. Water is simulated to fall onto the rock, and the flow of the water draws the shape of the waterfall. The water is represented by a continuum of numerous water particles and the interaction between the particles is then calculated. Lines are drawn in relation to the behavior of the water particles. The lines are then “flattened” using what TeamLab considers to be “ultrasubjective” space. When a person stands on the rock or touches the waterfall, they too become like a rock that changes the flow of water. The flow of water continues to transform in real time due to the interaction of people. Previous visual states can never be replicated, and will never reoccur (TeamLab 2018).

“Rock where People Gather” illustrates that interactive works permit us to appreciate both the work and the properties brought about by the interactions. To define these characteristics of interactive art, Dominic Lopes states, “A work of art is interactive just in case it prescribes that the actions of its users help generate its display” (Lopes 2010:36, original emphasis). The display is anything that is instanced in a work, or the perceptual properties that come about via interactivity. Users help generate these features making interactive works distinctive. However, at this point, one could imagine reading the chapters of, let us say, a digitized copy of The Brothers Karamazov in random order, thereby changing what properties get instanced from the original work. Does this example qualify as interactive art in the Lopesian sense? Although some stories, such as choose-your-own-adventure books, allow readers to shuffle the narrative arc, most traditional stories do not; if the randomized Karamazov example is interactive, it is only so in the weakest sense of the term because users are not prescribed to change the properties as described. Another way to think about these differences returns us to a work’s structure. Readers who decide to roguishly randomize a story merely change how they access a work’s structure simply because the medium does not prohibit it, whereas readers of choose-your-own-adventure books and other interactive works can change the work’s structure in a prescribed manner (Lopes 2001:68).

That users are responsible for generating certain features of an interactive work means that their displays, unlike those of non-interactive works, can occur in a couple of different ways (Lopes 2010: 37-38). The less standard of the two occurs when the displays of an interactive work are generated in a succession of states over a period of time, but where none of the displays can be revisited. One such example is Telegarden , a temporary work of computer art that users accessed from a networked computer. The work was comprised of a table with an attached mechanical arm that dispensed water and food for the plants via the users’ inputs. As one may imagine, the garden took shape in a variety of ways over the span of its exhibition, but each state of the garden, or its succession of display states, could not be repeated. Although not common, videogames can also exhibit this kind of display variability. Consider the experimental game, Cube . For a limited time, players could explore a large cube and its nested smaller cubes while racing to be the first to reach the center. As with Telegarden , players generated different properties of the game displays by interacting with it, but once a new display was generated, the previous ones were gone.

The more standard of the two variable structures for interactive works are displays that can be repeated, such as most net art and videogames that can be accessed many times, from multiple locations, to generate different displays. Although repeatable works are more common (at least with videogames if not museum-housed works), more needs to be said about the changing properties of these works and how the repeatability trait distinguishes interactive digital works from non-interactive digital images.

If the display properties of digital images can vary from instance to instance due to even slightly different settings on different devices (e.g., brightness, resolution, intensity), then the aesthetic and structural differences of many works could be misconstrued as interactive. Since the example just given is not an interactive work of art, it is worth looking more closely at what is going on with non-interactive repeatable works versus interactive repeatable ones. Consider traditional performance works such as works of theater and music. Each performance might differ to a slight degree due to different performers and other varying conditions of the environment, and these may certainly affect our aesthetic experiences each time. However, those changes, in principle, do not reshape the structure of the performed play or song. In the same way, the subtle changes made with a digitally displayed image do not change the structure of the image-based work. Compare those slight artistic or aesthetic variations to the display variability of interactive works. For example, many videogames permit players to choose which route to take, quests to accept, characters to kill or save, personalities to adopt, and the like. These sorts of in-game player choices are not merely generating features such as varying the brightness or resolution, nor are they as straightforwardly interactive as a game of chess that ends in a win or a loss. Rather, the degree of variability permits multiple endings. Again for comparison, while traditional tragedies will always end on a tragic note, some highly variable works can end either on a tragic note or on one that is not at all tragic.

To articulate the above more clearly, Dominic Preston says,

for any given artwork, each possible set of structural and aesthetic properties F is a display type of that artwork. (Preston 2014: 271, original emphasis).

From the above, we can briefly infer the following scenarios: works like digital photographs are ontologically similar to plays and music because they consist of one prescribed display type. While the display type might permit multiple displays (duplicates, performances, instances, etc.) consisting of subtle variances between the particular tokens, there is still a single correct display that should be maintained or achieved. Works that instance a succession of states such as Telegarden and Cube consist of multiple potential display types where only one display type is instantiated at any given time. Now, compare such works with those like videogames that present us with the strong degrees of display variability mentioned earlier. Because some repeatable works can end drastically differently from one “playthrough” to the next, there is no singular, correct display. Instead, these sorts of works consist of both multiple display types and multiple displays, which means users will generate one of the possible display types (and their displays) each time they repeat the work.

According to Katherine Thomson-Jones (2021), there is a problem with Preston’s claim that interactive artworks — at least ones that are digital — have multiple display types, as well as multiple displays. This is because the digital is inherently replicable and replicability requires a transmissible display — a single display type that can have multiple, interchangeable instances. This seems to introduce a problem of incompatibility: How can we have an image whose instances still count as instances of the same image-based work when those instances, in virtue of users’ actions, look very different from one another? There are various ways one might overcome this problem — for example, by distinguishing between the display of an image and the display of an artwork that incorporates the image in question. Preston’s distinction between display and display type can continue to play a role here. While the concept of interactivity with high variability is mostly applicable to videogames, one can imagine interactive digital installations, net art, and table-top roleplaying games to which it also applies.

It is important to reiterate that the strong interactivity just described is not restricted to the digital. Whilst interactivity is a standard feature of many contemporary digital works, and the responsiveness of such works is remarkable, non-digital appreciative categories can also exploit a similar degree of display variability. For example, literature, theater, and tabletop role-playing games can be strongly interactive in ways similar to many digital artworks. What is unique about all such works are the ways in which things like immersion, agency, identity, and fiction, to list a few features, are impacted by interactivity, due to the user’s role in the work (for more, see Robinson & Tavinor 2018; Patridge 2017; Meskin & Robson 2016).

A noteworthy point about the concepts presented above is that they are all conceived with the norms of traditional art and art practices in mind, meaning, works of art that are predominantly object-based. However, as described, interactive digital works can be said to have a “behavior” based on prescribed interactions. While traditional artworks typically emphasize a work that is complete prior to audience engagement, interactive works emphasize the moment-to-moment unfolding of the works by way of audience engagement. One recent approach to the ontology of art suggests that interactive works (among other kinds) are better conceived on a process-based, rather than on an object-based, model (Nguyen 2020). A key difference between the two models is that the former focuses on the user’s actions and experiences or “inward aesthetics”, while the latter focuses on the “outward” aesthetic features of the self-contained object (Nguyen 2020: 25). While a process-based account prioritizes the internalizability of a user’s actions, it does not completely give up the idea of an artistic object. Rather, it renders the object’s significance secondary insofar as any appreciation for a work’s objecthood is in service to the activities it permits (Nguyen 2020: 20).

Just as the case of digital art can enrich our understanding of interactivity, so it can enrich our understanding of artistic creativity and creative attribution. This is in part because the issues of interactivity and creativity are closely related. In making a work that is strongly interactive, an artist cedes to the user a certain amount of control in determining the look, sound, or structure of the work’s display(s). This raises a question about the user’s opportunities to be creative — to engage in creative interactions with a work — and how these opportunities can be supported or constrained by the artist’s design. In order to answer this question, we need to unpack the notion of creative control. In addition, we need to consider how creativity can be attributed to multiple agents involved at different stages of a work’s production. As it turns out, the case of AI art is particularly useful when considering the conditions of creativity and creative collaboration.

There is already a robust debate about the nature of creativity as it occurs in many different areas of human activity (see, e.g., Gaut & Kieran, eds., 2018; Paul & Kaufman, eds., 2014) There is a case to be made, however, that this debate can be enriched by drawing on work in the philosophy of AI. In everyday life, sophisticated AI systems are now being used for all kinds of purposes: We rely on these systems when we use Internet search engines, play strategic videogames, accept purchasing recommendations from online retailers, and check for viruses on our computers. In addition, we can use AI to generate new images and text, some of which can be incorporated into works of art. One can type a series of prompts into a chatbot like ChatGPT in order to generate a new screenplay in a certain genre. Similarly, one can assemble a set of images on which to train an “artbot” like MidJourney in order to generate paintings, drawings, or what look like photographs. It is common to attribute creative agency to the person who purposively initiates, and then monitors, the program used to generate the images or text that make up a work of AI art. A question remains, however, as to whether this should be the sole creative attribution when AI is involved. Some artists describe the AI system with which they work as a creative “partner”, and not just a sophisticated artistic tool. This is particularly the case with recent artworks that rely on “Deep Learning” (DL) to generate images or text in a remarkably independent way. Both chatbots and artbots rely on deep learning to categorize huge datasets (images or text) according to previously undetected patterns. To do this, a DL system must give itself new instructions — ones that depart from the initial instructions of the program — for the kind of image or text segment, and for the particular image or text segment, to be produced.

Among AI artists, the ones who write their own DL programs are the most likely to describe AI as a creative partner rather than just a creative tool. This seems particularly fitting when there is a synchronous collaboration between the artist and their DL system. For example, the works of Sougwen Chun are the result of Chun drawing alongside and in response to the actions of a mechanical drawing arm that is controlled by Chun’s custom-made program, D.O.U.G. (short for “Drawing Operations Unity Generation X ”). Chun and D.O.U.G. take turns adding to a single drawing. During this process, it is harder than one might think to say what makes the difference such that Chun is a creative agent, engaged in a creative drawing process, and D.O.U.G. is not. This is the case even though it is Chun alone who comes up with the idea for the work and initiates the drawing program.

As Margaret Boden has argued (2014), when philosophers deny the possibility of a computer ever being creative, they tend to underestimate the capacities of computers to produce items that are genuinely new as well as valuable in some domain. Still, many creativity theorists argue that novelty and value are insufficient for creativity; a third condition is needed, one concerning the manner of production. In order for something novel and valuable to count as creative, it must have been produced in a way that is agent-driven. The agency condition can be filled out, or broken down, in a variety of ways. At its core, however, the notion of agency is generally assumed to be opposed to the notion of having been ‘programmed’, or simply instructed, to perform certain tasks in a “mechanical”, or blind, fashion. Thus, the most basic objection to the possibility of creative computers is that they can only do what they are programmed to do, according to the intentions of a human agent. This objection needs clarification, however, since no set of rules completely determines the actions involved in following that set of rules. Since the advent of DL and other kinds of generative algorithm, it is possible for a computer program to change itself, to detect independent phenomena other than the ones that it was designed to detect, and to mimic spontaneity through randomness. Is this an instance of creative rule-following? If it is, we might expand our notion of creative collaboration. Perhaps creative collaboration is found, not just between human beings, but also between human beings and machines. In so far as the machines in question support strong interactivity, a work of digital art might involve three-part collaborations between human artists, human users, and AI.

Digital media can also be used for the purpose of connecting physical locations to virtual ones by using locative media. The phrase “locative art” is traced to Karlis Kalnins who applied the phrase to experimental projects coming from Locative Media Lab, a collective of international researchers and practitioners working with locative media. (Galloway & Ward 2005 ). Since the term “locative” is connected to location, site-specificity plays a significant role in our appreciation of locative works. Unlike with non-digital cases, however, site-specificity in locative art is both physical and virtual. The general concept is this: locative-specific media connect physical spaces with virtual ones, the perceptual features of which are generated from a digital device by human interactions. We often experience locative media in our ordinary and daily lives through navigation systems like Google Maps or Waze, and also creatively through augmented reality apps like Pokemon Go, AR graffiti (an app that allows users to visualize what their graffiti will look like in situ ), architectural simulators, and more. These are location-based works, often called locative projects or locative art, that use locative media. While locative technology has been around for decades, it is a relatively new subcategory to be recognized within the arts. Even so, locative art is more broadly acknowledged in the fields of technology, games, and sociology.

To understand the many ways locative media might be used for artistic practice, consider the following three examples.

• What Was There (2010–2023) was a website that allows users to type in the coordinates of their current location (via their digital device) to see how certain geographical locations look throughout history. By typing a specific address into the application, the user experiences the physical location in front of them and represented images and facts of that location as they appeared in the past, from the same vantage point. Data on the site relies on regular citizens to upload historic images and connect them to specific locations, making them accessible to others; the greater the participation the richer the experience when navigating a particular place. Not only can guests gain a deeper connection to their specific localized places, but such applications motivate people to explore and appreciate locations outside of their normal destinations.
• The Transborder Immigrant Tool has been used in a number of artworks and exhibitions.

The Transborder Immigrant Tool, devised by Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, was a mobile phone application intended to guide individuals who were making their way to the United States through the deserts of the U.S./Mexico borderlands to water. The application delivered poetry to its users in an effort to assist in their emotional and mental well-being while offering information about survival during the dangerous journey. The creators of The Transborder Immigrant Tool considered it to be a performance intervention that included the app itself, its API, public reactions, and an ensuing government investigation. By the time TBT was ready for distribution in 2011, the border crossing had become more dangerous, presenting the risk that carrying a TBT phone might put users in danger. While the project was never distributed to its intended users, it still succeeded in confounding systems of political control, creating a call to action that resonated internationally, and using poetry to “dissolve” the US-Mexico border (Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 et al 2007).

• KlingKlangKlong is played with smartphones that translate the players’ locations into sound. This is achieved in a straightforward manner: By moving through the physical space, the players simultaneously move on the surface of a virtual sequencer. One dimension (usually the latitude of the player) corresponds to pitch, the other dimension (longitude) is mapped to the time-position on the sequencer. The interface allows a manual switch to other audio parameters, although this feature is experimental. Each device receives the location and state changes of the currently active players almost instantly. The devices are connected by a central server, which also sets the boundaries of the playing field and manages the virtual players.

KlingKlangKlong serves as an experimental arrangement to explore the idea of playful (social) systems, a construction where human and virtual subsystems play with each other. In addition to the human participants, it therefore deploys a number of virtual players (»Virtuals«). Humans and Virtuals meet each other in mixed reality, a concept that was realized in early locative games. The commonly created soundtrack is the primary medium of communication between the players. Musical structures may temporarily arise through synchronized movements or be destroyed by any player’s intervention (Straeubig & Quack 2016).

In each of these examples, users synchronize geographical locations with virtual ones, granting mobility for users while also further challenging the paradigm of museum-driven works and art appreciation. The interactivity described in section 4 factors significantly into each of these projects, but also of importance are the social, economic, environmental, and political implications that factor in the design, development, and use of such works. Most of these projects are intended to bring about positive change, one way or another, by using locative media and by borrowing certain gaming mechanics for the purpose of engagement and interactivity. In fact, much of what is written about locative art is from fields within digital media studies on the media’s ‘playable’ qualities (avoiding the idea that artists are trying to merely gamify public spaces).

On the playable nature of locative art, Miguel Sicart says,

the data produced and used in smart cities should not necessarily be presented as a utility for citizens. It should be presented as a prop for play, as games but also as the source for toys and playgrounds. Data-rich cities can become playable cities, and, by becoming such, they can become more human, more inclusive spaces (Ackermann: 2016, 27).

Once again, the process-oriented and performative nature of locative works is central to appreciating the spaces they create. In connection with the playability of locative media, locative projects are also modifiable and typically intended to be hackable by the public in the communities where they are displayed. While the terms “hacker” and “hacking” may carry negative connotations, in its original conception, the practice of hacking was meant to improve upon existing computer programs, acknowledging the achievements of both the original creator and subsequent revisionists (Levy:1984). It is in this vein that locative projects are usually intended to change and improve over time given how users “play” with the data and inputs. In other words, local communities can play with these projects and even modify them, making locative works as relevant and reflective of the community as possible.

The above suggests that locative projects often have broader goals than mere entertainment. Although often intended to motivate play and playful attitudes, which, as indicated in the examples above can occur to varying degrees, the goal-oriented nature of locative works often makes the kind of play involved a “serious” kind. Serious play occurs when the enjoyment and pleasure that come from play do not just comprise entertainment but also serve some meritorious, real-world goal. A work can be said to support serious play even when users are not aware of the social or political goals of the work.

The customizable nature of locative media lends itself well to the altruistic aims of many locative artists. However, inclusivity, climate protection, social change, and any other desired effect of locative projects requires a given community to have sufficient funds for, access to, and user-knowledge about digital locative technology. This concern can also be understood, not just in terms of community requirements, but also in terms of technological requirements, for successful locative art. One way of putting it is as follows:

For any technological device to be “aware” of its context—physical or otherwise—it has to be able to locate, classify, collect, store, and use “relevant” information, as well as to identify and discard or ignore “irrelevant” information (Galloway & Ward 2005).

There are numerous political and economic factors affecting access to local and global spaces. With locative art, these factors are concerning for both ethical and artistic reasons.

• Ackermann, Judith, Andreas Rauscher, Andreas and Daniel Stein, 2016, Introduction: Playin’ the city. Artistic and Scientific Approaches to Playful Urban Arts . Navigationen-Zeitschrift für Medien-und Kulturwissenschaften, 16(1), pp.7-23.
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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Thomson-Jones, Katherine, 2014, Philosophy of Film , in Oxford Bibliographies Online .
• Enlighten, “WhatWasThere” (2010–2023) [ WhatWasThere available online ] [ archive link ]
• Gottfried Michael Koenig Project
• Austin Museum of Digital Art
• Digital Art Museum
• Rhizome’s Artbase , the largest on-line archive of new media art
• Digital Art & Design – Victoria and Albert Museum , information on the history and practice of computer art and design.
• The Whitney Museum’s Art Port , providing access to the museum’s collection of digital art and an exhibition space for commissioned works of net art.

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Digital Vs. Traditional Art: Is One Better Than the Other?

Can you identify what all of these careers have in common: Social Media Manager, Lyft Driver, Podcast Producer, Mobile App Developer, Virtual Assistant, 3-D Printer Technician, and Content Marketer? They are all related to technology, but 15 years ago many of these jobs didn’t exist .

We are currently teaching and preparing our students for future careers that don’t yet exist. A study conducted by the Institute for the Future (IFTF) and Dell Technologies concludes that 85% of the jobs that will exist in 2030 haven’t even been created yet. All of these careers will exist because of the ever-changing nature of technology. It’s something that isn’t going away, which is why more schools are infusing digital arts curriculum.

According to the 2019 State of Art Education Survey , 52.2% of art teachers want to learn more about teaching digital art effectively. However, only 21.9% of art teachers feel comfortable teaching a digital arts curriculum.

The want and need to teach digital medium is there, but is it truly important to teach? Will digital art take the place of traditional artmaking?

The Importance of Digital Arts Education

Some view technology as a threat to originality and as seeking to replace traditional artmaking. This idea can certainly be worrisome for art teachers. However, studies suggest the use of digital tools in art education increases artistic development and creativity. In a digital age, art teachers feel the need now more than ever to advocate for their programs. A digital arts curriculum can serve as a powerful advocacy tool.

Here are some of the benefits of teaching digital art in your classroom:

1. Increased Access

Not every student has a set of watercolors or acrylic paint set at home, but many students have access to some type of digital device like an iPad or smartphone. Sure, devices might not be cheap initially, but in comparison to all the consumable tubes of oil paint an artist might buy in a year, the one-time technology purchase makes sense. Yes, technology breaks and needs replacing, but so do paintbrushes and canvases.

2. Convenience

Carrying around the necessary art materials to create as you’d like isn’t always convenient. It’s not always realistic to carry around a set up for plein air painting or to fill up a water cup for watercolor. It can be a hassle. Creating with a digital medium is relatively hassle-free. You can carry your device with you almost everywhere, and it’s always ready when you are ready to create.

3. Instant Sharability

Because digital art creation is already stored on a digital device, it is easier for artists to share their work in it’s highest form. Work can be shared digitally on websites and through social media instantly. Sure, a photograph of a painting doesn’t usually do the physical features of the painting justice, but it can communicate the overall idea.

4. Increased Productivity

Creating digitally saves time. If you make a mistake on a digital drawing or painting, you can simply press the undo button to start over. In a digital creation, you can erase without a trace, change colors easily, and position and resize objects in seconds. You are not limited by the physical features of the material world.

Why Traditional Art Matters

Digital art requires no less skill than traditional artmaking, but it does require a different mode of thinking. Yes, a digital device will have the ability to make a stroke look and layer like watercolor or give the texture of drawing with charcoal. However, when one learns traditional art techniques, they gain a deeper understanding of the materials and what they can do.

Here are some of the benefits of traditional artmaking methods:

1. Hands-on Experiences

Learning to manipulate a paintbrush to create different paint strokes or using carving tools to create a sculpture provides a physical, tactile experience. Through this experience, you gain a broader view of how materials can be used. The physical creation is good for hand-eye coordination as well as motor skills. Mixing yellow and blue paint to create green is an experience one cannot get the same way by digitally mixing colors.

2. Unique Pieces

Because of the handmade nature of traditional artworks, they aren’t easily reproduced. Each creation is truly a one-of-a-kind piece, unlike a digital creation that can be reproduced and shared instantly. Because of this, traditional art pieces typically have more value than digital art pieces.

3. Increased Versatility

Digital is only one medium while traditional art methods allow you to create with different media. Creating an image with graphite compared to pigmented paint will yield different results and experiences. The outcome of digital art creation typically produces one look of a clean finished product, whereas using different art materials does not.

4. Forced Problem-Solving

Unlike the undo button on a digital device, mistakes can’t always be easily erased. This restriction forces an artist to problem-solve their solution to physically fix their error. Better yet, it encourages an artist to no longer make those mistakes and ultimately improves their skills.

How to Start Infusing Digital Art into your Curriculum

There is no magic to digital tools. The magic comes from how we teach our students to foster their creativity. Generations before us have been using new technologies in different forms. Using chalk on chalkboards and pencils on paper were once novel ideas. Taking a boring worksheet and putting it on an iPad doesn’t make it exciting; it’s still going to be boring.

Exceptional learning can happen with or without advanced technologies, but when it’s done right, it can increase experiences. If you’re not ready to fully immerse yourself in the world of technology, look for ways you can ease in. Instead of replacing traditional artmaking methods completely, look for ways you can enhance them. Assess the concepts that aren’t going well in your classroom; could taking a digital approach improve the process? For example, teaching one-point perspective drawing can be a chore, but learning it digitally might make the process easier while learning the same concepts. Creativity will be the skill of the future. What can we do to help our students gain creative insight within our teaching?

If you’re not sure how to start infusing digital art into your curriculum check out these resources.

• Digital Photography Basics PRO Learning Pack
• Discovering Photoshop Basics PRO Learning Pack
• Digital Animation PRO Learning Pack
• 3-D Printing Basics PRO Learning Pack
• iPads in the Art Room AOEU Course
• 10 Digital Art Projects That Will Spark Student Creativity
• Everyone Can Create Curriculum by Apple
• The Digital Art Teacher
• Digital Art for Beginners by Udemy

Technology isn’t going anywhere, and it will continue to evolve at an ever-changing speed. There’s no doubt that both traditional and digital art creation are essential. As educators, we need to find ways to use them together to create the best learning opportunities we can for our students.

What’s holding you back from teaching digital art?

Why do you feel teaching both digital and traditional artmaking is essential?

Magazine articles and podcasts are opinions of professional education contributors and do not necessarily represent the position of the Art of Education University (AOEU) or its academic offerings. Contributors use terms in the way they are most often talked about in the scope of their educational experiences.

Abby Schukei

Abby Schukei, a middle school art educator and AOEU’s Social Media Manager, is a former AOEU Writer. She focuses on creating meaningful experiences for her students through technology integration, innovation, and creativity.

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Final Project Essay by Eva

My current focus is the exploration of digital art projects with the added element of interactivity, and how this additional aspect influences the art experience for the audience. I further explored the effect of seeing user’s own face reflected in the project, by exploring digital artists whom used Style Transfer mirrors. Wondering how a person would feel if they had some control over the sequence of events of them observing the art project, as well their reaction to seeing their own reflection – became my two focal points in the development of this project.

I am building a display (Fg. 1)  that will be centred around a screen, with mirrors positioned to reflect the screen towards one another, a “control panel” in reach of the users’ hand, and potentially a headset (depending if audio elements will be incorporated).

In the most simple terms: I want to create a(n audio-)visual experience that will activate the camera feature and showcase the users face in the finale of their experience of navigating through visual sketches. Human behavioural patterns tend to indicate a stronger sense of awareness of one-self when a reflection of their physical appearance is in sight. This particular phenomenon made me consider when are the times we lose touch with ourselves? A routine, a mundane rotation of the dynamic lifestyle can detach   the individual from their true self. By provoking my audience to look at themselves, I am intending for them to capture a few moments out of their busy schedule to think about themselves, and what   sort of emotion is triggered when you are just faced with yourself.

The more I dive into the ever-so developing aim of the project, the more I change the physical layout for the purpose of fulfilling the maxim extent of my vision. The display with a curtain, similar to a photo-booth opening and closing, would create a very intimate experience for the user, as there would be absolutely no distractions, just the visual aid of the screen and the mirrors, and themselves.   I do truly believe the addition of audio aid would be beneficial, but I need to see the extent of my ability on this part and/or the ability to use other artists’ music. There will be no souvenir to keep from this experience, but rather a quick flashback of the emotion you felt when you saw your-self in a dark display in the IMA lab.  

More technically: I will be creating visual animations with Processing, that will be at parts interactive with a joystick that the user will be able to play with. My plan right now is to create the visual experience, currently considering the time frame from 1-6 minutes; build a small prototype of the display checking the angles for the mirrors; having the first prototype fo the display in a week time.  

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Home — Essay Samples — Information Science and Technology — Computer Graphics — Research in Digital Art

Research in Digital Art

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Published: Oct 23, 2018

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Art and technology, the beginning, the beginnings of the internet, computer generated imagery, interactive digital installations, exploring the internet, concept and styles, digital sculpture, art on screen.

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Give Me the Full Immersive!

Submitting to the maximalist spectacles that are encroaching on real museums’ turf..

This article was featured in One Great Story , New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

Is this the end of the movie or the beginning?” I heard someone say. We were in the Hall des Lumières, which is the name these days of the landmarked former bank building on Chambers Street, and I too was attempting to orient myself in its trippy gloom. On a continuous loop, strange cucumber-shaped whales were beamed onto the ceiling of the great vaulted room, and images of sunflowers and forests flecked with gold shone on the walls. Viennese waltzes played from speakers. This was “Gustav Klimt: Gold in Motion,” one of the latest cultural exhibitions (and surely not the last) to advertise itself with the ubiquitous words immersive experience. 

The space was half-filled with the characters you tend to see in galleries and museums on rainy weekday afternoons: distracted parents, pods of teenagers, tourists wearing dazed expressions and matching flannel shirts. Unlike at most traditional art venues, however, many of them were sprawled on the hall’s cold marble floor in various attitudes of contemplation and wonder, and a few of them, like me, may have even briefly been asleep. There was also an entire room downstairs dedicated to Klimt selfies.

Wandering the dimly lit chambers, I met a salty older gentleman with a Hemingway-style beard who frowned silently when I asked him what he thought of the show. But a younger patron from Miami named Isha, whose phone was alight with TikToks of her Klimting, told me she liked “the feeling of being inside the artist’s mind.” This was her first immersive, she said with a gleam, but she and her friends were already planning to visit many more.

That wouldn’t be difficult. These kinds of shows have been around for years, but lately they’ve reached a saturation point — in high art, tourist schlock, and the blurry regions in between. New York has recently hosted “Beyond King Tut: The Immersive Experience,” “Monet’s Garden: The Immersive Experience,” and “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience,” which is not to be confused with “Immersive van Gogh.” Also “Frida Kahlo: The Life of an Icon” (“An immersive biography”), “Magentaverse NYC” (“Explore the boundless sights, sounds, feelings and inspirations of the Pantone Color of the Year 2023”), and “INTER_” (“Ancient wisdom meets tech-enabled art” that’s “now open for beta in Soho”). Tourist guides promote immersive activities at the museums of Broadway, Ice Cream, Illusions, and Sex, and the haughtier bastions of culture are scrambling to install their own experiential exhibits. MoMA has Refik Anadol’s “Unsupervised,” and David Zwirner will unveil a Yayoi Kusama “infinity mirrored room” in May.

If you spend enough time at these increasingly elaborate and inescapable spectacles, you’ll notice two things. The first, obviously, is the exorbitant cost of your ticket: “Gold in Motion” cost $34, which is $4 more than the Met and $9 more than the Neue Galerie, both of which have actual Klimts on their walls. And the second thing, I can report with some surprise, after immersing myself in quite a few, is the easy, dreamy, slightly addictive quality of the shows. As you move from one pleasantly distracting set piece to another, pondering when to ingest the lemon-flavored edible in your pocket, it feels like playing hooky — a reprieve from the hushed, ponderous solemnity of the Establishment museums and galleries.

These shows are connecting with people, and we have many stories to tell,” says Mark Lach. We’re meeting one morning at the echoing pier space by the East River where “Beyond King Tut” has recently ended its holiday run. Lach, who is 65, is the King Tut show’s creative producer and the president of a company called Immersive, which designed the project with National Geographic . Like many people in this mushrooming industry, he began his career in theatrical management, staging big-hair rock shows in Florida, and has many multisensory exhibits to his credit on topics ranging from Saturday Night Live to Cleopatra to the Titanic. Disarmingly ebullient and wearing a baseball cap, he reminded me of Steven Spielberg or maybe the Wizard of Oz.

The immersive craze began with a series of van Gogh shows that originated in the south of France in the mid-aughts, which proved that consumers would pay more to see re-creations of art in event halls than they would to view oil-on-canvas originals at proper museums. But only in the past few years have these exhibits truly proliferated, thanks to the confluence of several specific trends. Social media stoked a bottomless appetite for filming ourselves in maximalist settings; digital video and sound technology got better and cheaper; and COVID created a glut of empty, inexpensive urban real estate.

Most conventional exhibits unfold linearly along a path planned painstakingly by curators. The classic immersive experience is a nonlinear environment that people can move in and out of like schools of fish without having to worry about a beginning, middle, or end. Usually, there is no original artwork hanging on the walls, and all of the stimulus is generated digitally through projectors and speakers.

“People say, ‘Why not just go see the van Gogh hanging on the wall? Why do we need to see it 20 feet tall?’” Lach says. “But I don’t see this as an either/or proposition.” Whether it’s a projection of Irises or King Tut’s impressive collection of walking sticks, the idea of a multisensory experience is to enhance, rather than duplicate, what Lach calls “the magical experience of coming face-to-face with the original artifact.” He’s a populist. If people have never been to Egypt, his immersive room can give them a taste of the sand and pyramids, and if it’s all a little schmaltzy, so be it.

Until recently, immersive shows, especially those in the U.S., tended to be like concerts or circuses: They would pop up in one city, play until demand slackened, then move on. But this model is changing. The Hall des Lumières, which opened in September, is part of a joint venture by the American entertainment company IMG and France’s Culturespaces, the industry’s most notable pioneer. They’re creating a network of permanent museum-style locations in cities from New York to Paris to Seoul that feature a stream of what the company describes as “bespoke digital art experiences.”

The shows are complex. “Beyond King Tut,” for example, requires several dozen speakers and projectors, along with hundreds of lighting instruments. But the exhibits can operate with minuscule staff and development costs can amortize to nothing the longer a tour goes on. As one veteran told me, “It’s much easier to send a single hard drive across the Atlantic than a whole series of precious, expensively insured paintings.”

In London, a company called Lightroom has leased a new building in King’s Cross. For an opening act, Mark Grimmer, one of the directors of 59 Productions, a London-based interdisciplinary design company, spent the past three years collaborating with the Instagram-friendly David Hockney to produce one of the first immersive blockbusters by a living artist. “David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller and further away)” opened in late February. Reviews by members of London’s art cognoscenti have ranged from respectfully polite to predictably scathing (the Guardian called it “an overwhelming blast of passionless kitsch”), but the spectacle has been mobbed by patrons willing to pay upwards of £25 per ticket.

“People are more digitally savvy now, of course, especially younger people, but post-pandemic, I think we’re seeking out these kinds of communal experiences,” Grimmer says. According to him, one of the most-talked-about digital experience in London these days is the $175 million “ABBA Voyage.” It’s priced like a live concert, with many tickets above £100, but stars digitized avatars of the original band. After the Hockney show ends, Lightroom plans to present all sorts of collaborations beyond the visual arts. It’s not hard to imagine a near future in which eerily sophisticated and immortal AI approximations of cultural icons (from Jeff Koons to Ai Weiwei to Led Zeppelin) loop endlessly in immersion venues around the globe, further erasing the distinction between art and performance. It would make the economics of the old museum game seem small.

The Met, though, doesn’t have anything quite so loud and disheveled as “Beyond King Tut.” When I visited, the galleries, which described the discovery of Tutenkhaman’s perfectly preserved tomb and the ritual steps of his ceremonial journey into the afterlife, were divided in some places by a flimsy network of flapping black curtains. The most boring section was Lach’s supposedly immersive hall with generic shots of camels and shimmering desert suns rising over the pyramids. The most interesting area by far was the last, where for an extra $15 you could rent a pair of virtual-reality goggles, recline in what looks like a chair heisted from the business-class section of Egyptian Airlines, and peer like a time traveler inside his tomb, seeing a tiled floor below your feet, the ceiling above, and all of the boy king’s favorite things (a chariot, his canes, jars of honey and smoked ox tongue) neatly stacked along the walls in wooden shelves and boxes.

Later that afternoon, I walked across the Manhattan Bridge to Dumbo to saturate myself in “Frida Kahlo: The Life of an Icon.” A dazzled, slightly more artsy-looking crowd took selfies in a series of smallish subterranean rooms filled with the piped-in sounds of tropical birds, and images of peacocks and fields of flowers bloomed and swirled across the walls. The strangely meditative show featured a series of multimedia exhibits devoted to various stages of Kahlo’s life, including a debilitating bus crash and her long convalescence, represented by a large hospital bed. I stood and watched in a kind of stupor for minutes, or possibly hours, as it sprouted leaves and changed colors.

There were VR goggles here too, although you had to be much higher than I was to appreciate the squadrons of watermelons and skull-headed mariachi bands flying through the air. Unlike most of the immersion halls I toured, however, the artful moving images that filled this one managed to tell a coherent story of Kahlo’s life and work with Diego Rivera. At one point, I found myself in a kind of Mexican courtyard, decorated with flower boxes and hung with colorful paper cutouts. Groups of young Brooklyn professionals were sitting at a long wooden table, earnestly coloring in famous Kahlo images with crayons, the way I’d seen schoolchildren do in more traditional museums. “I think it’s a work team-building thing,” one of the gallery assistants said. And so I sat at one of the tables and started coloring, too.

The established museums have grudgingly acknowledged that they need to get into this game. Michael Connor, a curator with long experience in digital art — he’s the co-executive director of Rhizome, which works with the New Museum — has a diplomatic take. “The immersive van Gogh exhibit, it looks like maybe a pleasant place to visit, but it doesn’t feel like it’s altering the cultural palate,” Connor says. “But it’s also establishing a kind of benchmark. It’s popular. People are paying money to see it, so artists have to work harder to do something weird and interesting and experimental to be part of it. Refik is an example of this, and I’m excited to see how other artists go beyond, or mess with, or subvert this moment.”

Connor is referring to Anadol, the tech-driven immersive star who recently unveiled “Unsupervised” — a luminous big-screen installation supposedly influenced by AI “to interpret and transform more than 200 years of art” at MoMA. Reviews have been almost as bad as Hockney’s; New York ’s Jerry Saltz compared it to being in the presence of a giant lava lamp. But when I dropped in, there were many more people sitting goggle-eyed in front of Anadol’s exhibit than there were wandering the lavishly curated Ellsworth Kelly celebration just up the stairs.

“People want to do more than just look at art passively on the wall these days,” says Tati Pastukhova, whose Washington, D.C.–based venture, Artechouse, has helped develop a variety of digitally inspired multimedia projects. “There’s a bit of a boom on to curate experiences that are a little more theatrical and that pique people’s curiosity and touch them in different ways,” she says.

In 2019, Artechouse leased a former boiler room on the corner of Chelsea Market and opened an enterprise showing immersive pieces by a series of digital artists. Recent spectacles have included “Magentaverse” (created with Pantone) and “Life of a Neuron” (affiliated with the Society for Neuroscience), as well as a popular digitized pageant called “Spectacular Factory: Holiday Multiverse,” featuring digital packages and wreaths spinning through the air.

Like most of the immersion entrepreneurs I talked to, Pastukhova was cagey about the profit side of the operation. She would clearly rather have Artechouse seen as an artistic endeavor and not a commercial one, but there’s no reason you can’t have both. When I took in the holiday show, the tickets cost $17 to $30 and there were 30 or so customers, many of them sprawled in various states of consciousness on the floor. There was a bar upstairs selling cocktails and a small merch area with Artechouse hoodies priced at $60. As colors climbed up the walls a little metronomically, a steady stream of curious new customers trickled in from the masses of tourists and fressers who flock Chelsea Market most hours of the day and night.

Grimmer says the immersion model depends on an endless flow of crowds and on telling stories in what he calls a “democratic” way. He points out that thanks to “Bigger & Closer,” more people may get a taste of David Hockney than will see the more canonical megaretrospective that opened in 2017 and is still slowly making its way around the museums of the world. “David sees this as a way of reaching more people. That’s what’s exciting him about the medium,” Grimmer says.

Pierre Battu, who spent years in the immersive business before becoming the general manager of Hall des Lumières, agrees. “We are opening people’s eyes to the wonders of the fine arts,” he says. “You have the music, you have the movement. You don’t necessarily need a background in the artist to appreciate it. You feel things right away. And afterward, we’ve found, people are much more likely to go to traditional museums to continue the journey.”

My own immersive journey ended with a visit one afternoon to “Monet’s Garden” on Wall Street. Since it opened in the fall it had been “extended” several times — a common tactic in this gold-rush stage of the immersion game, Battu says, to manufacture a sense of urgency. My ticket cost $35. The person who took it said that roughly 200 people had already come through the gates that afternoon and that on peak weekend days the show saw an average of 1,000 visitors.

“I could explain to you why Monet was the greatest artist who ever lived, but this might not be the place to do it,” Jerry Saltz said as we ascended the escalator toward the gardens, which were planted with lengths of artificial grass and plasticated flora, including tulips, ivy, and, obviously, water lilies. This was Jerry’s first immersive, and I wanted to get his professional critic’s opinion. He was on record saying the immersive art world would probably one day have its version of Francis Bacon, but we were now in the sector of entertainment rather than high art, and today he seemed happy to be entertained.

“Monet’s Garden” had a selfie station where a family from New Jersey was gesticulating wildly in front of their phones, and other visitors were standing and recording yet more images of themselves on a replica of the famous Japanese footbridge that the Impressionist painted obsessively in his gardens at Giverny. There was a coloring room and a place where your own water-lily designs could be captured and projected alongside the artist’s. Jerry sat for a spell under a wall of fake ivy with a slightly perplexed look on his face, attempting to process the meaning or non-meaning of the digital art phenomenon.

“So far, nothing has happened on your interior, but I guess we’re okay with that,” Jerry said as we made our way to the main immersion hall. People were perched on uncomfortable boxlike seats and sprawled here and there on the floor. Employees were handing out vinyl “Monet’s Garden” seat cushions, like at an amusement-park ride. On the ground, disjointed images of crows and purple haystacks and snowy days swirled around, and Jerry said a little loudly and to no one in particular: “That’s a Monet floor, kids! It’s good that it moves, kids!”

Afterward, we stood blinking in the gift shop, pricing water-lily wine totes ($19) and Monet silk shawls ($45). We met a couple named the Comos from Wilton, Connecticut, devout culture connoisseurs, who said they enjoyed immersive shows and visited them regularly. They’d been to the Hall des Lumières (“We were underwhelmed”) and the original van Gogh spectacle (“It blew this one away”).

Did they think this was the end of traditional museumgoing and high culture as we know it? Of course not. It was a distraction and an entertainment and a way to experience the work of “artists we know and love.”

Jerry and I walked out into the rain. “Let’s do one more of these today,” he said. “Let’s do a doubleheader.”

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Drawing in the digital age: observations and implications for education.

1. Introduction

2. four drawing events, summer 2018, 2.1. thinking through drawing.

The model is asked to take a very active pose for a minute or less … As the model takes the pose … you are to draw, letting your pencil swing around the paper almost at will, being impelled by the sense of action you feel. Draw rapidly and continuously in a ceaseless line, from top to bottom, around and around, without taking your pencil off the paper. Let the pencil roam, reporting the gesture. You should draw, not what the [subject] looks like, not even what it is, but what it is doing . Feel how the figure lifts or droops—pushes forward here—pulls back there—pushes out here—drops down easily there. Suppose that the model takes the pose of a fighter with fists clenched and jaw thrust forward angrily. Try to draw the actual thrust of the jaw, the clenching of the hand. A drawing of prize fighters should show the push , from foot to fist, behind their blows that makes them hurt. (ibid., p. 14–15)

2.2. Artistes et Robots

2.3. space-time geometries and movement in the brain and in the arts 9, 2.4. drawing lab paris, cinéma d’été 10, 3. conclusions, 3.1. drawing in contemporary culture and education, 3.2. drawing as thinking, and drawing on the whole, 3.3. toward a comprehensive model of drawing instruction for the digital age, 3.4. “machine as artist” with implications for drawing instruction in the digital age, conflicts of interest.

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Simmons, S. Drawing in the Digital Age: Observations and Implications for Education. Arts 2019 , 8 , 33. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts8010033

Simmons S. Drawing in the Digital Age: Observations and Implications for Education. Arts . 2019; 8(1):33. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts8010033

Simmons, Seymour. 2019. "Drawing in the Digital Age: Observations and Implications for Education" Arts 8, no. 1: 33. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts8010033

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“How Artists Can Bridge the Digital Divide and Reimagine Humanity”

By agnes chavez.

Photo courtesy of Agnes Chavez

A 10,000-square-foot inflatable  Space Cloud with a floor made of ten tons of white salt drifting like beach sand, illuminated with programmable LED lights, lands in a park in Taos—a small, rural, multicultural community in New Mexico. Inside, plankton as large as whales drift on the fabric surfaces of the dream-like cloud, while participants wearing virtual reality headsets paint in three-dimensional space.

The inflatable pavilion designed by Espacio La Nube transformed into a learning space for the integrated STEMarts youth program at the 2018 PASEO Festival. We welcomed 700 students from across Taos County, giving them the opportunity to look under the hood and hear from the artists how the magic is created through the merging of art, science, and technology. As one student participant put it, “Now I know what is possible!”

The STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics) movement has been an important catalyst to develop digital literacy skills in education. To achieve an inclusive and equitable digital society, however, we must broaden the definition of STEAM even further to include the development of humanistic skills and sustainable “ futures thinking ” through community-engaged projects. This is especially critical in rural and underserved communities where we are facing a gender, race, and culture gap in the field of science and technology. These gaps in digital arts continue to be a challenge in curation.

The STEMarts Lab, founded in 2009, designs installations and artist-embedded curricula that focus on the intersection of the arts, humanities, and philosophy with science and technology. Through immersive and educational sci-art experiences, students work directly with artists whose work imagines what can be achieved with digital technologies. In contrast to an approach that assumes that any social problem has a technological solution, this collaboration empowers our youths and communities to understand the ethics behind new technologies and their impact on nature and humanity, while giving them the tools they need to creatively engage in and with society.

New media artists can play a pivotal role

New media artists have much to contribute to closing the “ digital divides .”  We live in a society that is fast-changing and increasingly reliant on digital technologies. To fully participate in this new society and reap its rewards, it is crucial to not only bridge the "first-level” digital divide of access to and affordability of information and communication technologies (ICT), but also to address the “second-level” digital divide, called the “production gap.” Filling this gap would give people around the world the necessary knowledge and skills to move collectively from being consumers of digital content to producers of it. Currently, the majority of user-generated content is created by a small group of elites. Therefore, it is critical to provide the diverse sectors of our communities with the skills to produce their own content.

But providing access alone—or even closing the production gap—will not help us solve our most complex problems. In order to be effective, as Jan A.G.M Van Dijk notes in The Digital Divide , “policies must simultaneously reduce existing social and digital inequalities.”

Bridging the multiple divides is an essential part of this process.  The United Nations’ Roadmap for Digital Cooperation outlines “key areas for action.” I focus on three of them below—digital capacity-building, digital public goods, and digital inclusion—and I show how collaborating with digital creatives through transdisciplinary educational initiatives can offer exciting new approaches and strategies to address these unique challenges.

The National Endowment for the Arts’ report, Tech as Art: Supporting Artists Who Use Technology as a Creative Medium , affirms that “Tech-centered artists are admirably poised to grapple with larger societal and sectoral challenges—whether engaging with audiences during the COVID-19 pandemic or responding to calls for greater equity and inclusion in the arts and technology. They can be invaluable partners for policy-makers, educators, and practitioners in arts and non-arts sectors alike."

• Digital capacity-building: Harnessing wonder

SPACE was the concept I explored for the 2018 PASEO Festival with curatorial advisors, Ariane Koek and Dr. Anita McKeown . The festival’s free youth program investigated inner and outer space, artistically, socially, and scientifically, and highlighted the role of art, science, and technology in contemplating our place in nature and re-imagining society. In YouthDay@Space Cloud , students from each of Taos County’s schools visited virtual reality stations by NoiseFold and Reilly Donovan where they experienced otherworldly landscapes, and a GPS interactive installation by Parker Jennings that transported them into outer space and back. Through Victoria Vesna ’s hacked gaming technology, they also learned of the destructive power of noise pollution on our oceans.

Through this artist-led experiential learning, students gain insight in the artists’ ways of knowing—sensory, embodied, visual, kinesthetic—which prioritize the creative and human connection to technology. Teachers visited the online STEMarts Curriculum Tool in advance to learn more about the artists so that they arrived ready to ask questions. Follow-up surveys showed that students found the experience positive and fun, and were curious to learn more about art, science, and digital technology. Years later, they still ask if “the bubble” is coming back.

The power of fun should not be underestimated. The Digital Divide affirms that fostering a positive attitude for using digital media is an important first step for closing the digital divide. Another strategy is making a long-term commitment to the community. Annual festivals create more impact than one-off events. Over six years of producing the PASEO Festival, we watched student, educator, and local government engagement grow. Community members stepped up to volunteer at the festival and learn from the artists. Teachers became proactive and asked for artists to come into their classroom to do hands-on workshops. Students continued to use the free digital tools.

One teacher was so excited by artists/activists Illuminator Collective ’s urban projection workshop that, a year later, she and her students created a protest to save the Arts Endowment in Taos Plaza. Students and teachers who have been participating since the first STEMarts programs at ISEA2012: Machine Wilderness , are now furthering their skills as content creators, teaching or mentoring others, pursuing new media arts fields, or simply walking away with a greater understanding of how they can become creative participants in this new digital society.

• Digital public goods: Creating shareable resources

New media artists are at the forefront of inventing and adapting what the UN roadmap calls “digital public goods”— such as open-source software or open data — to create new digital creation tools. Through the STEMarts youth programs built around artist installations, we are cultivating a new pool of creative thinkers who see the possibilities of these open tools and how to use them. These strategies help participants in underserved communities move from being passive consumers of technology to cultural producers, empowered with the technology to tell their own stories.

As an example, Space Messengers is an immersive and educational sci-art exhibition as part of an international youth exchange program in partnership with U.S. embassies. Students in participating countries use artist-created tools to contribute content for the exhibition that travels to festivals around the world. For this installation, artist and openFrameworks programmer Roy MacDonald wrote the code for the web-based Space Board platform and integrated the (x)trees algorithm. This allows students to co-write their science-informed messages and the audience to respond in real time with their own messages from their devices. Both students and the public experience the excitement of learning science and contributing content as part of a real or virtual reality environment. These open-source tools are available for artists to adapt on GitHub .

In another science collaboration, Taos students learn from artist Markus Dorninger how to use his free Tagtool app, which transforms an iPad into a live visual instrument to tell their stories. With this tool, anyone can connect their iPad to a projector and paint with light, create animated graffiti, or tell improvised stories in multiplayer sessions using their fingers or stylus, eliminating the need for computers and mapping software.

• Digital inclusion: The STEMarts Model

The STEMarts model (see below) builds youth programming around four pillars:

• 21st-century skills and technology
• Cutting-edge science knowledge
• Real-world application and collaboration
• New media arts and social practice

We explore how an understanding of art, science, and technology expands our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to nature and society. We do this by building partnerships and co-designing with universities, science institutions , community organizations, and all levels of government to integrate diverse perspectives and discover new approaches.  The curriculum, board, and advisors for these projects comprise an international and interdisciplinary team of artists, scientists, and cultural specialists that are actively contributing their knowledge—for example, CoDesRes and its STEAM place-based learning interventions and artist, Andrea Polli with STEAM NM. As another example, Dr. Greg Cajete , consultant and author of the book Native Science: Laws of Interdependence , is instrumental in the integration of traditional ecological knowledge. Deeply engaging diverse community members as collaborators in the creation of the workshop, installation, or festival is key to assuring that a wide range of people have equal access to the knowledge and skills, and a platform to share their stories.

Providing free online resources supports access for rural and underserved communities. The STEMarts Curriculum Tool is an online resource that provides teachers with no-cost content for building STEAM activities around the work of participating new media artists, while providing such artists with opportunities to share their work and knowledge with educators and the community. COVID-19 has been a catalyst to get schools and cultural institutions up to speed with internet and computer access, making these free artist-built resources a powerful way to address diversity in the second-level digital divide.

Why this matters now more than ever

We face unprecedented challenges, and if we are to create equitable responses, we must begin to develop numerous literacies. Students can develop understanding and empathy while exploring the applications of science and technology in our societies. They do not need to end up working in related fields to benefit from acquiring humanistic and scientific literacy—and ensuring that they do so will in turn benefit society and the world.

Creating an equitable and sustainable digital society is an essential process that calls for what the United Nations refers to as “digital cooperation”: an ecosystem approach of multistakeholder collaborations between private sector, public sector, academia, and civil society. The need to bring people together from diverse disciplines and cultural perspectives to create alternative futures is urgent.  In a world of complexity and constant change, no one approach is sufficient. Pioneering artists experimenting with technologies can play an important role fostering literacies and bridging social divides. By supporting these artists creating new digital tools and experiences, we allow our diverse communities to participate in reimagining our humanity.

Agnes Chavez is a new media artist , educator, and creative producer collaborating across disciplines to create data-visualized light and sound installations that seek balance between science and art, and nature and technology. Her most recent work, Fluidic Data , is a permanent installation which visualizes data from the Large Hadron Collider created in collaboration with scientists at the CERN Data Center in Geneva Switzerland. In 2009 she founded the STEMarts Lab , which designs immersive and educational sci-art experiences that empower youth and communities through art, science, and technology. She participated as an artist and as education director for the ISEA2012:Machine Wilderness symposium. In 2014, she co-founded The PASEO Festival and served as co-director/youth program director until 2018.  She created the SUBE , Language through Art, Music & Games curriculum for teaching language to children, which is in its 25th year. She is now developing an international youth exchange program called BioSTEAM International , partnering with U.S embassies to connect classrooms across borders to collaborate on sci-art installations that inspire scientific, artistic and humanistic literacy.

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17 Digital Artist Interview Questions and Answers

Learn what skills and qualities interviewers are looking for from a digital artist, what questions you can expect, and how you should go about answering them.

A digital artist is a creative professional who uses computer software to design and create two-dimensional and three-dimensional images. These artists work in a variety of industries, including advertising, gaming, movies, and television.

If you’re a digital artist, you may be wondering how to prepare for a job interview. After all, your portfolio is likely to speak for itself. However, you can still expect to be asked a few questions about your experience and artistic process. In this guide, we’ve compiled a list of common digital artist interview questions and answers to help you prepare for your next job interview.

Are you comfortable working on your own or do you prefer to work in a team?

What are some of the most important skills for a digital artist, how do you stay creative when working on repetitive projects, what is your experience with using 3d modeling software, provide an example of a time when you had to use your critical thinking skills to solve a problem., if given the opportunity, would you like to work remotely or do you prefer to work in an office setting, what would you do if you were assigned a project that was outside of your area of expertise, how well do you communicate without using words (i.e. through visuals or animations), do you have any experience with virtual reality or augmented reality technologies, when working on a team, how do you handle constructive criticism from others, we want to attract younger audiences. how would you go about creating digital content that appeals to younger people, describe your process for creating a piece of digital artwork., what makes you stand out from other digital artists, which digital art tools do you wish you had more experience with, what do you think is the most important thing to remember when creating digital artwork for a brand, how often do you update your skills and knowledge as a digital artist, there is a bug in one of your animations. how do you handle this situation.

This question helps employers determine if you are a self-starter or need to work in a team environment. They want to know that you can be productive and get your work done independently, but also enjoy collaborating with others. Your answer should show that you have experience working both on your own and as part of a team.

Example: “I am comfortable working on my own, however I prefer to work in a team setting. In my last role, I was the only digital artist, so I had to do everything myself. However, I really enjoyed collaborating with other artists and designers on projects. I find it more beneficial to collaborate with others because we can bounce ideas off each other and learn from one another.”

Employers ask this question to make sure you have the skills needed for the job. They want someone who is creative, organized and able to work well with others. When answering this question, think about which skills are most important to your success as a digital artist. Consider including some of these skills in your answer:

Creativity Communication Organization Example: “The two most important skills for a digital artist are creativity and communication. Creativity is essential because it allows me to come up with new ideas and solutions to problems. I also need to be able to communicate clearly with my team members so we can all work together effectively.”

Employers may ask this question to see if you have strategies for staying motivated and productive when working on repetitive projects. Use your answer to highlight your creativity, problem-solving skills and ability to adapt to different types of work.

Example: “I find that the best way to stay creative is by finding new ways to approach my work. I try to switch up my workflow every few months so that I’m not doing the same thing over and over again. For example, I might start a project using traditional media but then transition to digital media halfway through. This helps me avoid getting bored with the same type of work.”

This question can help the interviewer determine your experience level with digital art. They may ask you about specific software programs to see if you have used them before and how much experience you have using them. Use your answer to share which 3D modeling software you are familiar with and explain what projects you’ve worked on that involved this software.

Example: “I am experienced in using several different types of 3D modeling software, including Autodesk Maya, Blender and Cinema 4D. In my last role as a graphic designer, I primarily used Maya for creating digital artwork. I also used it to create 3D models for print ads and other marketing materials. I used Cinema 4D when designing websites to add animation elements.”

Employers ask this question to learn more about your problem-solving skills. They want to know that you can use your creativity and critical thinking abilities to solve problems in the workplace. When answering this question, think of a time when you used your critical thinking skills to solve a problem at work or school.

Example: “At my last job, I was tasked with creating an advertisement for our company’s new product. The client wanted me to create a digital ad that would be eye-catching and engaging. After speaking with the client, I learned they wanted something fun and colorful. However, they also wanted it to have a serious tone. I decided to create a digital ad that had bright colors but also included some text. This helped convey the seriousness of the product while still being visually appealing.”

This question is an opportunity to show your interviewer that you are a self-motivated and independent worker. You can answer honestly, but also consider the company culture when deciding whether or not to mention remote work opportunities in your response.

Example: “I prefer working remotely because I find it more productive for me. However, I am also very comfortable collaborating with others on projects and would be happy to do so in an office setting if needed.”

Employers may ask this question to see how you handle challenges. Use your answer to show that you are willing to learn new things and develop your skills. Explain what steps you would take to complete the project while learning from a more experienced colleague or supervisor.

Example: “If I were assigned a project outside of my area of expertise, I would first try to find someone who could mentor me on the task. If there was no one available, I would make sure to thoroughly read through all of the instructions before starting work. I would also schedule time each day to practice working on similar projects so I could gain experience in the subject matter.”

This question can help the interviewer understand how you might work with other team members and clients. Use examples from your past experience to show that you’re able to communicate effectively without using words.

Example: “I’ve worked on projects where I was the only artist, but also in teams of up to five artists. In both situations, I learned how to use visuals and animations to communicate my ideas to others. For example, when working alone, I would create a storyboard for each animation or scene I wanted to create. Then, I would share it with my client so they could provide feedback. When working in a team, I would create a similar document, but then we would discuss our ideas together before creating the final product.”

Digital artists often need to be familiar with emerging technologies that can help them create more realistic and immersive digital experiences. Employers ask this question to make sure you have the necessary skills to succeed in their role. In your answer, share what experience you have with these technologies. Explain how it helped you complete a project or use it as an example of why you would like to learn more about virtual reality and augmented reality.

Example: “I’ve had some experience working with virtual reality and augmented reality technologies. I worked on a project for a client who wanted to create a VR experience where users could explore a new city. I used Unity 3D software to build out the VR environment. Then, I integrated Google Cardboard technology so people could view the VR content using their phones.”

As a digital artist, you may work with other designers and artists to create the best possible product. Employers ask this question to make sure you can collaborate well with others. Use your answer to show that you are open to feedback and suggestions from others. Explain that you value input from everyone on the team.

Example: “I love working in teams because it allows me to learn new things from my colleagues. I find constructive criticism very helpful when working on projects. I always try to take note of any advice or tips my teammates give me. This helps me improve my skills as a digital artist and makes me more valuable to the company.”

This question is a great way to show your creativity and how you can use digital tools to create content that appeals to specific audiences. When answering this question, it’s important to highlight the importance of creating content for different age groups while also showing how you would appeal to younger people.

Example: “I think it’s really important to create content that appeals to all ages because it allows brands to reach more customers. However, I do believe there are ways to attract younger audiences through digital art. For example, when working on a project for my previous employer, we were tasked with creating an online game that appealed to children. We used bright colors and fun characters to make the game appealing to kids.”

This question can help the interviewer understand how you approach your work and what steps you take to complete a project. Use examples from past projects to describe your process, including any tools or techniques you use to create digital art.

Example: “I start by researching my subject matter and gathering inspiration for the piece I’m working on. Then, I sketch out some ideas using pencil and paper before transferring them to the computer. Once I have an idea of what I want the final product to look like, I begin creating it digitally using software that allows me to manipulate colors and textures. This is when I add in details and make sure everything looks exactly as I envisioned.”

Employers ask this question to learn more about your unique skills and talents. They want to know what makes you a valuable asset to their company. When answering this question, think of two or three things that make you stand out from other digital artists. These can be specific skills or experiences that are relevant to the job.

Example: “I am an extremely organized person, which is why I have always been successful as a digital artist. In my previous role, I was responsible for creating all of the marketing materials for our client’s website. Because I am so detail-oriented, I managed to create everything on time while still maintaining high quality. This helped me win over my client and get them to refer me to others.”

This question can help the interviewer understand your experience level and how you learn new skills. Use this opportunity to show that you are eager to learn more about digital art tools, including which ones you have already mastered.

Example: “I wish I had more experience with 3D modeling software because it’s a skill I would like to add to my portfolio. I am currently taking an online course on Blender, which is one of the most popular free 3D modeling programs. I also want to expand my knowledge of animation software so I can create more complex animations for clients.”

This question can help the interviewer determine how much you know about working with a brand and what your priorities are when creating digital artwork. Use examples from past experiences to show that you understand the importance of meeting deadlines, maintaining quality standards and collaborating with others.

Example: “I think it’s important to remember that every piece of work I create for a brand is an extension of their brand identity. This means that my primary goal should be to make sure that everything I produce looks professional and fits in with the rest of the brand’s marketing materials. It also means that I need to meet any deadlines set by the client and maintain high-quality standards throughout the entire process.”

Employers want to know that you are committed to your career and continually learning new skills. They may ask this question to see if you have a plan for continuing your education throughout your career as a digital artist. In your answer, explain how you stay up-to-date on the latest trends in your industry. You can also mention any certifications or training programs you’ve completed recently.

Example: “I am always looking for ways to improve my skills as a digital artist. I regularly attend conferences and workshops where I learn from other professionals. I also subscribe to several design blogs so I can keep up with the latest software releases. I find these resources helpful because they allow me to try out new techniques before using them in my own work.”

Bugs are common in digital animation. Employers ask this question to make sure you know how to handle bugs and other technical issues that may arise during your workday. In your answer, explain what steps you would take to fix the bug. Show that you have experience with fixing bugs or other technical problems.

Example: “I would first try to figure out why there is a bug in the animation. If I can’t find an easy solution, then I will contact my supervisor for help. Once they tell me how to fix it, I will go back into the program and edit the animation. This process takes time, but I am used to working through these types of situations.”

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• Published: 31 October 2017

The visual essay and the place of artistic research in the humanities

• Remco Roes 1 &
• Kris Pint 1  

Palgrave Communications volume  3 , Article number:  8 ( 2017 ) Cite this article

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What could be the place of artistic research in current contemporary scholarship in the humanities? The following essay addresses this question while using as a case study a collaborative artistic project undertaken by two artists, Remco Roes (Belgium) and Alis Garlick (Australia). We argue that the recent integration of arts into academia requires a hybrid discourse, which has to be distinguished both from the artwork itself and from more conventional forms of academic research. This hybrid discourse explores the whole continuum of possible ways to address our existential relationship with the environment: ranging from aesthetic, multi-sensorial, associative, affective, spatial and visual modes of ‘knowledge’ to more discursive, analytical, contextualised ones. Here, we set out to defend the visual essay as a useful tool to explore the non-conceptual, yet meaningful bodily aspects of human culture, both in the still developing field of artistic research and in more established fields of research. It is a genre that enables us to articulate this knowledge, as a transformative process of meaning-making, supplementing other modes of inquiry in the humanities.

Introduction

In Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (2011), Tim Ingold defines anthropology as ‘a sustained and disciplined inquiry into the conditions and potentials of human life’ (Ingold, 2011 , p. 9). For Ingold, artistic practice plays a crucial part in this inquiry. He considers art not merely as a potential object of historical, sociological or ethnographic research, but also as a valuable form of anthropological inquiry itself, providing supplementary methods to understand what it is ‘to be human’.

In a similar vein, Mark Johnson’s The meaning of the body: aesthetics of human understanding (2007) offers a revaluation of art ‘as an essential mode of human engagement with and understanding of the world’ (Johnson, 2007 , p. 10). Johnson argues that art is a useful epistemological instrument because of its ability to intensify the ordinary experience of our environment. Images Footnote 1 are the expression of our on-going, complex relation with an inner and outer environment. In the process of making images of our environment, different bodily experiences, like affects, emotions, feelings and movements are mobilised in the creation of meaning. As Johnson argues, this happens in every process of meaning-making, which is always based on ‘deep-seated bodily sources of human meaning that go beyond the merely conceptual and propositional’ (Ibid., p. 11). The specificity of art simply resides in the fact that it actively engages with those non-conceptual, non-propositional forms of ‘making sense’ of our environment. Art is thus able to take into account (and to explore) many other different meaningful aspects of our human relationship with the environment and thus provide us with a supplementary form of knowledge. Hence Ingold’s remark in the introduction of Making: anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture (2013): ‘Could certain practices of art, for example, suggest new ways of doing anthropology? If there are similarities between the ways in which artists and anthropologists study the world, then could we not regard the artwork as a result of something like an anthropological study, rather than as an object of such study? […] could works of art not be regarded as forms of anthropology, albeit ‘written’ in non-verbal media?’ (Ingold, 2013 , p. 8, italics in original).

And yet we would hesitate to unreservedly answer yes to these rhetorical questions. For instance, it is true that one can consider the works of Francis Bacon as an anthropological study of violence and fear, or the works of John Cage as a study in indeterminacy and chance. But while they can indeed be seen as explorations of the ‘conditions and potentials of human life’, the artworks themselves do not make this knowledge explicit. What is lacking here is the logos of anthropology, logos in the sense of discourse, a line of reasoning. Therefore, while we agree with Ingold and Johnson, the problem remains how to explicate and communicate the knowledge that is contained within works of art, how to make it discursive ? How to articulate artistic practice as an alternative, yet valid form of scholarly research?

Here, we believe that a clear distinction between art and artistic research is necessary. The artistic imaginary is a reaction to the environment in which the artist finds himself: this reaction does not have to be conscious and deliberate. The artist has every right to shrug his shoulders when he is asked for the ‘meaning’ of his work, to provide a ‘discourse’. He can simply reply: ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I do not want to know’, as a refusal to engage with the step of articulating what his work might be exploring. Likewise, the beholder or the reader of a work of art does not need to learn from it to appreciate it. No doubt, he may have gained some understanding about ‘human existence’ after reading a novel or visiting an exhibition, but without the need to spell out this knowledge or to further explore it.

In contrast, artistic research as a specific, inquisitive mode of dealing with the environment requires an explicit articulation of what is at stake, the formulation of a specific problem that determines the focus of the research. ‘Problem’ is used here in the neutral, etymological sense of the word: something ‘thrown forward’, a ‘hindrance, obstacle’ (cf. probleima , Liddell-Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon). A body-in-an-environment finds something thrown before him or her, an issue that grabs the attention. A problem is something that urges us to explore a field of experiences, the ‘potentials of human life’ that are opened up by a work of art. It is often only retroactively, during a second, reflective phase of the artistic research, that a formulation of a problem becomes possible, by a selection of elements that strikes one as meaningful (again, in the sense Johnson defines meaningful, thus including bodily perceptions, movements, affects, feelings as meaningful elements of human understanding of reality). This process opens up, to borrow a term used by Aby Warburg, a ‘Denkraum’ (cf. Gombrich, 1986 , p. 224): it creates a critical distance from the environment, including the environment of the artwork itself: this ‘space for thought’ allows one to consciously explore a specific problem. Consciously here does not equal cerebral: the problem is explored not only in its intellectual, but also in its sensual and emotional, affective aspects. It is projected along different lines in this virtual Denkraum , lines that cross and influence each other: an existential line turns into a line of form and composition; a conceptual line merges into a narrative line, a technical line echoes an autobiographical line. There is no strict hierarchy in the different ‘emanations’ of a problem. These are just different lines contained within the work that interact with each other, and the problem can ‘move’ from one line to another, develop and transform itself along these lines, comparable perhaps to the way a melody develops itself when it is transposed to a different musical scale, a different musical instrument, or even to a different musical genre. But, however, abstract or technical one formulates a problem, following Johnson we argue that a problem is always a translation of a basic existential problem, emerging from a specific environment. We fully agree with Johnson when he argues that ‘philosophy becomes relevant to human life only by reconnecting with, and grounding itself in, bodily dimensions of human meaning and value. Philosophy needs a visceral connection to lived experience’ (Johnson, 2007 , p. 263). The same goes for artistic research. It too finds its relevance in the ‘visceral connection’ with a specific body, a specific situation.

Words are one way of disclosing this lived experience, but within the context of an artistic practice one can hardly ignore the potential for images to provide us with an equally valuable account. In fact, they may even prove most suited to establish the kind of space that comes close to this multi-threaded, embodied Denkraum . In order to illustrate this, we would like to present a case study, a short visual ‘essay’ (however, since the scope of four spreads offers only limited space, it is better to consider it as the image-equivalent of a short research note).

Case study: step by step reading of a visual essay

The images (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) form a short visual essay based on a collaborative artistic project 'Exercises of the man (v)' that Remco Roes and Alis Garlick realised for the Situation Symposium at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne in 2014. One of the conceptual premises of the project was the communication of two physical ‘sites’ through digital media. Roes—located in Belgium—would communicate with Garlick—in Australia—about an installation that was to be realised at the physical location of the exhibition in Melbourne. Their attempts to communicate (about) the site were conducted via e-mail messages, Skype-chats and video conversations. The focus of these conversations increasingly distanced itself from the empty exhibition space of the Design Hub and instead came to include coincidental spaces (and objects) that happened to be close at hand during the 3-month working period leading up to the exhibition. The focus of the project thus shifted from attempting to communicate a particular space towards attempting to communicate the more general experience of being in(side) a space. The project led to the production of a series of small in-situ installations, a large series of video’s and images, a book with a selection of these images as well as texts from the conversations, and the final exhibition in which artefacts that were found during the collaborative process were exhibited. A step by step reading of the visual argument contained within images of this project illustrates how a visual essay can function as a tool for disclosing/articulating/communicating the kind of embodied thinking that occurs within an artistic practice or practice-based research.

Figure 1 shows (albeit in reduced form) a field of photographs and video stills that summarises the project without emphasising any particular aspect. Each of the Figs. 2 – 5 isolate different parts of this same field in an attempt to construct/disclose a form of visual argument (that was already contained within the work). In the final part of this essay we will provide an illustration of how such visual sequences can be possibly ‘read’.

First image of the visual essay. Remco Roes and Alis Garlick, as copyright holders, permit the publication of this image under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Second image of the visual essay. Remco Roes and Alis Garlick, as copyright holders, permit the publication of this image under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Third image of the visual essay. Remco Roes and Alis Garlick, as copyright holders, permit the publication of this image under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Fourth image of the visual essay. Remco Roes and Alis Garlick, as copyright holders, permit the publication of this image under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Fifth image of the visual essay. Remco Roes and Alis Garlick, as copyright holders, permit the publication of this image under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Figure 1 is a remnant of the first step that was taken in the creation of the series of images: significant, meaningful elements in the work of art are brought together. At first, we quite simply start by looking at what is represented in the pictures, and how they are presented to us. This act of looking almost inevitably turns these images into a sequence, an argument. Conditioned by the dominant linearity of writing, including images (for instance in a comic book) one ‘reads’ the images from left to right, one goes from the first spread to the last. Just like one could say that a musical theme or a plot ‘develops’, the series of images seem to ‘develop’ the problem, gradually revealing its complexity. The dominance of this viewing code is not to be ignored, but is of course supplemented by the more ‘holistic’ nature of visual perception (cf. the notion of ‘Gestalt’ in the psychology of perception). So unlike a ‘classic’ argumentation, the discursive sequence is traversed by resonance, by non-linearity, by correspondences between elements both in a single image and between the images in their specific positioning within the essay. These correspondences reveal the synaesthetic nature of every process of meaning-making: ‘The meaning of something is its relations, actual and potential, to other qualities, things, events, and experiences. In pragmatist lingo, the meaning of something is a matter of how it connects to what has gone before and what it entails for present or future experiences and actions’ (Johnson, 2007 , p. 265). The images operate in a similar way, by bringing together different actions, affects, feelings and perceptions into a complex constellation of meaningful elements that parallel each other and create a field of resonance. These connections occur between different elements that ‘disturb’ the logical linearity of the discourse, for instance by the repetition of a specific element (the blue/yellow opposition, or the repetition of a specific diagonal angle).

Confronted with these images, we are now able to delineate more precisely the problem they express. In a generic sense we could formulate it as follows: how to communicate with someone who does not share my existential space, but is nonetheless visually and acoustically present? What are the implications of the kind of technology that makes such communication possible, for the first time in human history? How does it influence our perception and experience of space, of materiality, of presence?

Artistic research into this problem explores the different ways of meaning-making that this new existential space offers, revealing the different conditions and possibilities of this new spatiality. But it has to be stressed that this exploration of the problem happens on different lines, ranging from the kinaesthetic perception to the emotional and affective response to these spaces and images. It would, thus, be wrong to reduce these experiences to a conceptual framework. In their actions, Roes and Garlick do not ‘make a statement’: they quite simply experiment with what their bodies can do in such a hybrid space, ‘wandering’ in this field of meaningful experiences, this Denkraum , that is ‘opened up’: which meaningful clusters of sensations, affects, feelings, spatial and kinaesthetic qualities emerge in such a specific existential space?

In what follows, we want to focus on some of these meaningful clusters. As such, these comments are not part of the visual essay itself. One could compare them to ‘reading remarks’, a short elaboration on what strikes one as relevant. These comments also do not try to ‘crack the code’ of the visual material, as if they were merely a visual and/or spatial rebus to be solved once and for all (‘ x stands for y’ ). They rather attempt to engage in a dialogue with the images, a dialogue that of course does not claim to be definitive or exhaustive.

The constellation itself generates a sense of ‘lacking’: we see that there are two characters intensely collaborating and interacting with each other, while never sharing the same space. They are performing, or watching the other perform: drawing a line (imaginary or physically), pulling, wrapping, unpacking, watching, framing, balancing. The small arrangements, constructions or compositions that are made as a result of these activities are all very fragile, shaky and their purpose remains unclear. Interaction with the other occurs only virtually, based on the manipulation of small objects and fragments, located in different places. One of the few materials that eventually gets physically exported to the other side, is a kind of large plastic cover. Again, one should not ‘read’ the picture of Roes with this plastic wrapped around his head as an expression, a ‘symbol’ of individual isolation, of being wrapped up in something. It is simply the experience of a head that disappears (as a head appears and disappears on a computer screen when it gets disconnected), and the experience of a head that is covered up: does it feel like choking, or does it provide a sense of shelter, protection?

A different ‘line’ operates simultaneously in the same image: that of a man standing on a double grid: the grid of the wet street tiles and an alternative, oblique grid of colourful yellow elements, a grid which is clearly temporal, as only the grid of the tiles will remain. These images are contrasted with the (obviously staged) moment when the plastic arrives at ‘the other side’: the claustrophobia is now replaced with the openness of the horizon, the presence of an open seascape: it gives a synaesthetic sense of a fresh breeze that seems lacking in the other images.

In this case, the contrast between the different spaces is very clear, but in other images we also see an effort to unite these different spaces. The problem can now be reformulated, as it moves to another line: how to demarcate a shared space that is both actual and virtual (with a ribbon, the positioning of a computer screen?), how to communicate with each other, not only with words or body language, but also with small artefacts, ‘meaningless’ junk? What is the ‘common ground’ on which to walk, to exchange things—connecting, lining up with the other? And here, the layout of the images (into a spread) adds an extra dimension to the original work of art. The relation between the different bodies does now not only take place in different spaces, but also in different fields of representation: there is the space of the spread, the photographed space and in the photographs, the other space opened up by the computer screen, and the interaction between these levels. We see this in the Fig. 3 where Garlick’s legs are projected on the floor, framed by two plastic beakers: her black legging echoing with the shadows of a chair or a tripod. This visual ‘rhyme’ within the image reveals how a virtual presence interferes with what is present.

The problem, which can be expressed in this fundamental opposition between presence/absence, also resonates with other recurring oppositions that rhythmically structure these images. The images are filled with blue/yellow elements: blue lines of tape, a blue plexi form, yellow traces of paint, yellow objects that are used in the video’s, but the two tones are also conjured up by the white balance difference between daylight and artificial light. The blue/yellow opposition, in turn, connects with other meaningful oppositions, like—obviously—male/female, or the same oppositional set of clothes: black trousers/white shirt, grey scale images versus full colour, or the shadow and the bright sunlight, which finds itself in another opposition with the cold electric light of a computer screen (this of course also refers to the different time zones, another crucial aspect of digital communication: we do not only not share the same place, we also do not share the same time).

Yet the images also invite us to explore certain formal and compositional elements that keep recurring. The second image, for example, emphasises the importance placed in the project upon the connecting of lines, literally of lining up. Within this image the direction and angle of these lines is ‘explained’ by the presence of the two bodies, the makers with their roles of tape in hand. But upon re-reading the other spreads through this lens of ‘connecting lines’ we see that this compositional element starts to attain its own visual logic. Where the lines in image 2 are literally used as devices to connect two (visual) realities, they free themselves from this restricted context in the other images and show us the influence of circumstance and context in allowing for the successful establishing of such a connection.

In Fig. 3 , for instance, we see a collection of lines that have been isolated from the direct context of live communication. The way two parts of a line are manually aligned (in the split-screens in image 2) mirrors the way the images find their position on the page. However, we also see how the visual grammar of these lines of tape is expanded upon: barrier tape that demarcates a working area meets the curve of a small copper fragment on the floor of an installation, a crack in the wall follows the slanted angle of an assembled object, existing marks on the floor—as well as lines in the architecture—come into play. The photographs widen the scale and angle at which the line operates: the line becomes a conceptual form that is no longer merely material tape but also an immaterial graphical element that explores its own argument.

Figure 4 provides us with a pivotal point in this respect: the cables of the mouse, computer and charger introduce a certain fluidity and uncontrolled motion. Similarly, the erratic markings on the paper show that an author is only ever partially in control. The cracked line in the floor is the first line that is created by a negative space, by an absence. This resonates with the black-stained edges of the laser-cut objects, laid out on the desktop. This fourth image thus seems to transform the manifestation of the line yet again; from a simple connecting device into an instrument that is able to cut out shapes, a path that delineates a cut, as opposed to establishing a connection. The circle held up in image 4 is a perfect circular cut. This resonates with the laser-cut objects we see just above it on the desk, but also with the virtual cuts made in the Photoshop image on the right. We can clearly see how a circular cut remains present on the characteristic grey-white chessboard that is virtual emptiness. It is evident that these elements have more than just an aesthetic function in a visual argumentation. They are an integral part of the meaning-making process. They ‘transpose’ on a different level, i.e., the formal and compositional level, the central problem of absence and presence: it is the graphic form of the ‘cut’, as well as the act of cutting itself, that turns one into the other.

Concluding remarks

As we have already argued, within the frame of this comment piece, the scope of the visual essay we present here is inevitably limited. It should be considered as a small exercise in a specific genre of thinking and communicating with images that requires further development. Nonetheless, we hope to have demonstrated the potentialities of the visual essay as a form of meaning-making that allows the articulation of a form of embodied knowledge that supplements other modes of inquiry in the humanities. In this particular case, it allows for the integration of other meaningful, embodied and existential aspects of digital communication, unlikely to be ‘detected’ as such by an (auto)ethnographic, psychological or sociological framework.

The visual essay is an invitation to other researchers in the arts to create their own kind of visual essays in order to address their own work of art or that of others: they can consider their artistic research as a valuable contribution to the exploration of human existence that lies at the core of the humanities. But perhaps it can also inspire scholars in more ‘classical’ domains to introduce artistic research methods to their toolbox, as a way of taking into account the non-conceptual, yet meaningful bodily aspects of human life and human artefacts, this ‘visceral connection to lived experience’, as Johnson puts it.

Obviously, a visual essay runs the risk of being ‘shot by both sides’: artists may scorn the loss of artistic autonomy and ‘exploitation’ of the work of art in the service of scholarship, while academic scholars may be wary of the lack of conceptual and methodological clarity inherent in these artistic forms of embodied, synaesthetic meaning. The visual essay is indeed a bastard genre, the unlawful love (or perhaps more honestly: love/hate) child of academia and the arts. But precisely this hybrid, impure nature of the visual essay allows it to explore unknown ‘conditions and potentials of human life’, precisely because it combines imagination and knowledge. And while this combination may sound like an oxymoron within a scientific, positivistic paradigm, it may in fact indicate the revival, in a new context, of a very ancient alliance. Or as Giorgio Agamben formulates it in Infancy and history: on the destruction of experience (2007 [1978]): ‘Nothing can convey the extent of the change that has taken place in the meaning of experience so much as the resulting reversal of the status of the imagination. For Antiquity, the imagination, which is now expunged from knowledge as ‘unreal’, was the supreme medium of knowledge. As the intermediary between the senses and the intellect, enabling, in phantasy, the union between the sensible form and the potential intellect, it occupies in ancient and medieval culture exactly the same role that our culture assigns to experience. Far from being something unreal, the mundus imaginabilis has its full reality between the mundus sensibilis and the mundus intellegibilis , and is, indeed, the condition of their communication—that is to say, of knowledge’ (Agamben, 2007 , p. 27, italics in original).

And it is precisely this exploration of the mundus imaginabilis that should inspire us to understand artistic research as a valuable form of scholarship in the humanities.

We consider images as a broad category consisting of artefacts of the imagination, the creation of expressive ‘forms’. Images are thus not limited to visual images. For instance, the imagery used in a poem or novel, metaphors in philosophical treatises (‘image-thoughts’), actual sculptures or the imaginary space created by a performance or installation can also be considered as images, just like soundscapes, scenography, architecture.

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Roes, R., Pint, K. The visual essay and the place of artistic research in the humanities. Palgrave Commun 3 , 8 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-017-0004-5

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