What is

Digital Art?
Warren Sack
Associate Professor, Film & Digital Media Department
affiliated faculty, Computer Science Department
affiliated faculty, History of Art & Visual Cultural Department
faculty, Digital Art & New Media Graduate Program
University of California, Santa Cruz
 outline
• a definition of aesthetics
• a definition of art
• a definition of digital media
• an example of digital media art
“aesthetics is for artists as...
ornithology is for the birds.”
– Barnett Newman (abstract expressionist)

not!
 define:aesthetics
• “…the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics
has been created using a
definition of aesthetics as ‘critical
reflection on art, culture, and
nature.’”
– Michael Kelly, editor in chief, Oxford Encyclopedia
of Aesthetics
 aesthetics
• beautiful
• sublime
• uncanny
• ...
define:relationalaesthetics
• “Relational Aesthetics: Aesthetic
theory consisting in judging
artworks on the basis of the inter-
human relations which they
represent, produce or prompt.”
– Nicolas Bourriaud
 art: a short history
• 1300-1900: realist: (Giotto to cinema) art
is representational
• 1900-1964: modernist: (invention of
cinema to Warhol’s Brillo Box) art explores
its manifest (sensual) properties
• 1964-now: postmodernist: art is defined by
its nonsensual, abstract properties
– Arthur Danto’s periodization
 aesthetics of art
• realist: Does it look real?
• modernist: Does it provide an
abstraction or an expression?
Does it explore the essential
elements of the medium?
• postmodernist: Why isn’t it (just)
what it looks like?
 1550: vasari
• Gioggio Vasari, encyclopedia of
artistic biographies
• art is about accurate
representation
1305: giotto
1507: leonardo
1895: the lumières
2001: pixar
2001: pixar
 2001: pixar

from pixar’s physical based modeling workshop, siggraph 2001

 art: a short history
• 1300-1900: realist
• 1900-1964: modernist
• 1964-now: postmodernist
1890: monet
1915:malevich
1950:pollock
1962:albers
2001: john simon, jr.
2005: maeda
 art: a short history
• 1300-1900: realist
• 1900-1964: modernist
• 1964-now: postmodernist
1964:warhol
1968:situationists
contemporary brillo art?
now:yes men
yesmen:identitycorrection
 what makes “art” art?
• institutions: design is all around
you; art requires you to go
somewhere special (e.g., a gallery
or a museum)
• theories: an artwork articulates a
“statement” in a larger
conversation or discourse
art statements are double
• warhol: art & package design
• situationists: art & comix
• yes men: art & public relations
• godard: film as philosophy?
 deleuze:thought & media
• “I wonder why we cannot treat, for
example, Resnais as a thinker,
Godard as a thinker...? ... We can
speak of the colors of the great
colorists of cinema, Antonioni,
Visconti, Godard; we might also
speak of them as philosophers.”
– Gilles Deleuze, lecture on “Cinema and Thought,”
1984, University of Paris 8
 define:digital art
• digital art is art made with the
means of computer science
(hardware, software, networks:
information and communcation
technologies)
 is it art or is it ...
...computer science?
 if there is no difference,
then you likely have a piece of
realist or modernist art.
cf., Donald Knuth’s The Art of
Computer Programming
 if it’s not easy to tell
but there is a difference,
then you likely have a work of
postmodern digital art;
cf., software art like Adrian Ward’s
Auto-Illustrator parody of Adobe
Illustrator
 define:digital media
• Digital media is a name for arts
and humanities computing. It
uses the means of computer
science, but should be different
from computer science.
 digital media should...
...question the fundamental
concepts of computer science.
– “The strong claim for aesthetic computing is that
by introducing ideas andmethods from art and
design into computing, new practices and
approaches will emerge responding to new
objectives that would not not naturally have evolved
within computer science and engineering.”
• Roger Malina. “A Forty Year Perspective on Aesthetic
Computing” in Paul Fishwick (ed.) Aesthetic Computing: