Digital Art by Christian Paul « Snuffalupigus’s Weblog

Digital Art by Christian Paul

Digital art has come a long way from a toilet hanging on a wall. In Digital Art Christiane Paul takes the reader on a journey from the Dadaist movement were art was stripped from all conventional matters that were defining art at the time, and the question of what is art was placed at the forefront of that art movement(Wikipedia, Dada http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dadaism) 11 Sept 2008. Marcel Duchamp became the poster child of this art movement when he placed a toilet on the wall of a museum, wrote a name on it and called it art. This was more a way for him to thumb his nose at the prominent art critics of that time, yet the critics loved it. They thought this toilet on a wall was such an amazing statement of what art is. Anything can be considered art from a toilet on a wall to the chair you are sitting on.

Christiane Paul considers this art movement to be one of the roots of digital art today. She used Duchamp as an example not because of a toilet on a wall, but more for his use of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa with his mustache and goatee alteration, and later on when he created more interactive art pieces such as Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics in Motion). Now, this art movement began during WWI in Zurich Switzerland, and Rotary Glass Plates was created in 1920, long before computers were ever created(Wikipedia, Fluxus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxus),9 Sept 2008. Christiane Paul uses this movement as an example of were the art world was heading in the early 1900’s to present day. She transcends from the Dadaist movement into the Fluxus art movement when the use of multiple art mediums where combined to make a single piece of art(Wikipedia, Fluxus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxus),9 Sept 2008. It’s really amazing how computers went from a giant calculator that took up an entire room of a university to what we have today in labs all around the world.

Paul takes us from the first notion of a computer as a Memex which consisted of desk with translucent screens which were used to browse documents, to an ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) that extremely large calculator I mentioned(Christian Paul, Digital Art (Thames& Hudson World of Art 2003),9. She follows the growth from a calculator to a UNIVAC the worlds first commercially distributed digital computer that could tackle numeric functions as well as text(Christiane Paul, Digital Art (Thames & Hudson World of Art 2003),9. The military took over the progression of the digital age at this time when they combined multiple computers together in a network with no real centralized location(Christiane Paul, Digital Art (Thames & Hudson WOrld of Art 2003),10. This allowed United States intelligence to accumulate and transfer documents through out this network without the threat of having a nuclear attack diminish our intelligence through out the very real threat of this happening during the Cold War. This network was known as ARPANET an acronym developed out of the Advanced Research Projects Agency. This is the root of what we know today as the World Wide Web.

When the World Wide Web was developed in the 1990’s computers were pretty prominent in plenty of wealthier households and Universities throughout the world(Christiane Paul, Digital Art (Thames & Hudson World of Art 2003),10. Computer technology was quickly developing into a solid basis for use as an art medium at this time. In the 70’s experiments in the art world were being conducted with television and analog tape technology, but in the 90’s computer technology jumped into a world of common use among the general public. It is no longer uncommon for Joe Shmoe to produce a beautiful work of art morphing digital pictures into a collage, or using plants and twisting them to create pretzel like images. One of the first ways digital imagery was utilized was through face recognition technology and age simulation. The picture above is of Bernardo Provenzano the Godfather of the Cosa Nostra mob family. Age simulation was used to catch illusive criminals who had been alluding law enforcement for years. Today these technologies are used much in the same way, yet now-a-days we can simulate images of a toilet floating in space, and call it art, or place our wonderful president and first lady as the subjects of American Gothic. Eat your heart out Duchamp.