Art Through A Digital Lens

The number of things which we routinely interact with as hobbies, through work, or just in day-to-day life are rapidly becoming more and more digitally augmented. Connected homes, smart variations of devices we’ve used for years and the ever lower barriers to entry when it comes to smartphones and tablets. Even this very newspaper article is available in a digital manner! One area which has always had a solid relationship with technology is art, with one influencing the other throughout the course of history. What happens when the lines blur, though? Can something as cold and digital as technology provoke thought and feelings in the same way oil, canvas and brushes do?

Digital art in the classical sense, wherein someone uses a computer of some kind to aid drawing or “painting” has been around since the early 1980s. Since then we’ve progressed to, as I’ve written about before, these computers actually creating art in their own right as AI opens new doors to what we consider as artwork at all. We’re also fortunate, both as artists and aesthetes, to live in a world of such convenience and ease of access. For the former, online platforms make it simple to exhibit and sell both physical and digital pieces. For the latter, virtual gallery tours are commonplace and, with the metaverse gaining momentum, will surely only become more feature-rich.

Virtual reality’s crossover with the art world has actually been big news, recently. Oculus, the company now owned by Facebook parent company Meta, was originally a startup founded by a gentleman called Palmer Luckey. As a thought-provoking piece of art, Luckey has created a VR headset which is designed to end the life of the user, should they be killed inside their virtual game world. While many people have misinterpreted this creation as some sort of terrifying, dystopian murder toy; it’s simply a one-off concept to highlight immersion, game design and the blurred lines between reality and virtuality. It’s Munch’s “The Scream,” but with a USB port for charging.

Thanks to huge resonance on social media, an art/technology crossover installation previously exhibited in The Guggenheim art gallery is another which caught the public eye. This piece featured a robotic arm, which was programmed to clean up a viscous, red fluid continuously leaking from itself. It’s movements because more frantic as it aged, as parts failed and leaks became worse before finally it ground to a halt in 2019. Its message was largely open to interpretation, but we can absolutely relate to its endless toiling while making no real progress toward its goal. Once again, technology offers a medium for artists wishing to convey a thought of feeling, to those absorbing their work.

I’m by no means an art expert. But happily, I do know someone who is an actual, qualified artist; so I asked them what they thought about art’s relationship with technology. For her, the breadth was the most striking thing. On the one hand, we have affordable and accurate 3D printing to bring digital designs to life in the real world, while conversely we see deeply complex and arguably dark examples like a VR headset rigged to milkshake the mind of its wearer. It has the means to create, but we’re also reminded that it offers just as much power to destroy. I for one am happier in a world, in which my poor performance in Angry Birds does not result in my untimely demise by brain explosion.