In college one of my Art History professors asked the class if digital art could ever be considered real art.
One opinion that stuck out to me was an older student, I was only a freshman, who was certain the answer was no. The reason being that digital art was viewed as some kind of photocopier for the brain. The artist could sit down in front of a computer and create a perfect image of what they wanted. Digital work could be undone and redone a million times to get the exact right output, whereas one who had to manipulate pigments in oil with a brush wouldn’t necessarily have that luxury. Every time they put the brush down they were changing the canvas, and there was no undo.
Because there was this capacity for mistakes, real art allowed for accidents and discoveries, whereas digital art was always polished and lacked the ability for surprise. I never offered my opinion, but as a budding Graphic Design major, I strongly disagreed. From my perspective these arguments against digital art were some of its best attributes. Unlimited undos meant tons of experiments were possible, and I think the idea that in digital media the artist always maintains 100% control over all of the output is false. There’s plenty of space for experiments and accidents to happen any time a human hand is involved.
This conversation came back to me after seeing a video where somebody was discussing audio books vs. traditional books. People will debate whether or not listening to an audio book counts as “reading” the book. While on the one hand there’s a physical distinction between the two methods of consumption, if comprehension is the end goal, comprehension can be achieved by both. The act of ones eyes skimming over symbols is not where the value is, it is in the interaction with what the symbols represent, and getting at that meaning can happen outside of symbol decoding.
So back to my art thing, if the end goal is expression, pushing around molecules versus pixels shouldn’t matter, the goal can be achieved in many different ways. Given the near ubiquity of digital art workflows today this is probably not even a debate anymore, but I think it speaks to an overall unease that some seem to have with our digital world. The idea that human technology such as paint and book are good, but iPad and MP3 are bad, can be a very limiting view. As Robert Pirsig says, “The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain, or in the petals of a flower.”