What is digital art? Learn the definition and see digital art examples. Learn about digital art history and see how it compares to other forms of art.
Updated: 11/21/2023
Digital Art | Definition, History & Examples
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Frequently Asked Questions
How is digital art made?
Digital art can be made on a machine, such as a computer or a digital camera. Computers run programs and they are designed especially for making art, such as Final Cut Pro for video editing, Adobe Illustrator for drawing, or Sketchup for 3D modeling.
What is the purpose of digital art?
Artists have many purposes for creating digital art. The earliest controversy arose in the 1960s, where it was seen as an automatic process. Since then, artists have striven to make art that questions the boundaries, thus separating the automatic, the random, and the original.
What is considered digital art?
Digital art is art created in a computer or other automatic machine like a digital camera.
It is generally understood to stand apart from fine" or "plastic" arts.
Where is digital art used?
Digital art comes in many forms like installation art, motion pictures, still photographs, and computer art. Depending on what form it takes, digital art can be found in galleries, movie theaters, or on the Internet.
Table of Contents
ShowHumans have employed a variety of art forms throughout history to express their creativity and ideas. These include organic materials from prehistoric times to the advanced digital technology in the modern-day. Nowadays, artists have a vast array of methods to choose from. Some may go the traditional route using paintbrushes, while others prefer digital art, which uses video technology and computers.
Digital art, as the word itself illustrates, is characterized by electronic, especially computerized technology.
Images can be drawn by hand and then scanned into a computer. They can also be created using hardware such as drawing tablets and a free open-source software program, such as Blender, or a paid software program like Adobe Photoshop. Digital art has evolved to create realistic animations, seen in famous Pixar movies.
Other modern digital art forms include 3D sculptural renderings, manipulation of video images, as well as a combination of various technologies.
In a nutshell, digital art is a method of merging art and technology that is perfect for multimedia presentations because it can potentially be viewed in many ways, including TV, internet, and social media.
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As technology continues to evolve, so does digital art. Here are some different kinds of digital art styles.
Fractal/Algorithmic Art
Fractal art uses computers to solve non-linear and polynomial equations of fractal structures, and the results produce images and visuals.
Data-Moshing
This process manipulates media files to produce the desired visual effects or images when the file is being decoded. It creates an amalgamation of frames and repetition of images.
Dynamic Painting
It is one of the most modern and advanced forms of digital art. The artwork is painted by a computer, thus requiring minimal physical labor by the mastermind a.k.a. the artist.
2D Computer Graphics
It transforms 2D dimensional models like texts and digital images into 2D computer graphics. It's used in the entertainment industry and generally on traditional graphics like typography, cartography, technical drawing, and advertising.
3D Computer Graphics
It's a modified version of 2D computer graphics as it renders 2D graphics by representing the three-dimensional aspect of geometric data found in models or structures.
Pixel art
This style of digital art uses software to create art at the pixel level. The pixels are sometimes enlarged for a retro appearance. This kind of graphics is derived from 8-bit and 16-bit computers and video game consoles.
Digital Photography
A variety of technologies produce electronic or computer-based photography to capture, create, edit and share digital images and photographs.
This digital art style creates, publishes, or uses digital photographs on computers and the internet.
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Although the expression 'digital art' was first used in the 1980s in connection to an early computer painting program, its story dates back to the 1950s.
Here's a timeline of its evolution.
1950s
Computers first saw the light of day in the 1940s when the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or the ENIAC, was created for military purposes.
Many artists and designers began working with mechanical devices and analog computers in the 1950s. They were early innovators that paved the way to digital pioneers.
In 1952, an artist, Ben Laposky, created 'Oscillon 40' using an oscilloscope to manipulate electronic undulating waves shaped by an electronic signal.
1960s
Few people had access to computers in the 1960s as they were expensive. They were common only in universities, research laboratories, and large corporations. So it's no surprise that scientists and mathematicians were the first to experiment creatively with them. Of course, they created their programs and used a plotter or impact printer to output their creations.
The focus of their early works was black and white geometric forms and structures. One of the first artists to create plotter drawings in color was Frieder Nake, a computer pioneer. Back in the day, he created one of the most intricate algorithmic works, a screenprint of a plotter drawing called 'Hommage à Paul Klee 13/9/65 Nr.2', which was inspired by one of Klee's oil-paintings called 'Highroads and Byroads' (1929).
Bell Laboratories
The emerging American computer-art scene was heavily supported by Bell Labs, producing many digital art pioneers. Among the artists and computer scientists employed, there were Claude Shannon, Ken Knowlton, Leon Harmon, Lillian Schwartz, Charles Csuri, A. Michael Noll, Edward Zajec, and Billy Klüver.
Billy Klüver was an engineer who formed Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) in collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg.
Many artists and musicians used the equipment at Bell Labs out of hours.
The laboratories helped develop early computer-generated animation. Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton's Studies in Perception, 1967, also known as Nude, became the famous works produced by Bell Labs.
1970s
At this point, many artists started to teach themselves to program instead of partnering with computer programmers.
One of the few institutions that fully incorporated computers and art into its teaching curriculum in the early 1970s was the Slade School of Art, University of London. A department called 'Experimental and Computing Department' was created with in-house computer resources unsurpassed by other institutions.
Paul Brown who studied at the Slade from 1977 to 1979, developed a tile-based image generating system. His computer-generated drawings based on a simple set of rules allowed individual elements to evolve or propagate.
Apple and Microsoft came in the late 1970s, making the first personal computers affordable and compact.
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1980s
Computers entered businesses and homes, becoming a part of everyday life.
Popular movies such as 'Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan' and 'Tron' both released in 1982, and television programs used computer graphics and special effects.
Videos, computer games, and computing technology exploded in popularity.
Inkjet printers evolved as the cheapest way to print in color. It became easier to create digital images with off-the-shelf paint software packages.
It was clear that a 'computer aesthetic' entered popular culture.
the 1990s and beyond
Nowadays, it's become obsolete to use 'Computer Art' to refer to digital artists and designers. Many artists now work in an increasingly interdisciplinary manner using a variety of traditional and modern tools interchangeably.
One such artist is James Faure Walker, both a digital artist and a painter. Since the late 1980s, Faure Walker has been combining the computer with drawings, paintings, and photography. The way he blends the various mediums can make it difficult to distinguish the physical paint and digital paint. His art is always abstract in pen, pencil, or watercolor, and he uses software packages such as Illustrator and Photoshop to explore digital motifs or linear marks and patterns.
The novelty of the "digital" in art has worn off as technology has become more ubiquitous. In the digital age, it is not unusual to see conceptual, video, internet, and social media art made with digital tools and media without a concrete connection to the digital art movement. Today, these types of works are often classified as "new media art."
In conclusion, digital art has been undervalued until the recent advent of NFTs, Non-Fungible Token, which allow digital assets to be tradeable in the digital world. Just like money, a fungible asset has units that can be interchanged. NFTs provide a new way for artists to sell their digital creations directly to art connoisseurs. It's a real artistic revolution!
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Humans have employed a variety of art forms throughout history to express their creativity and ideas using different tools and methods: organic material and modern.
The advent of computers in the 1940s paved the way for digital art, which is characterized by electronic, especially computerized technology. It merges art and technology.
- software programs
- mathematics
- electronic devices
However, as technology evolves, new digital are styles are created:
- Fractal/Algorithmic Art
- Data-Moshing
- Dynamic Painting
- 2D Computer Graphics
- 3D Computer Graphics
- Pixel art
- Digital Photography
From the 1950s to this day, digital art has continued to evolve. Electronic devices have become daily commodities with advanced tools to create and share art.
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Video Transcript
What Is Digital Art?
Some artists use materials like paints and brushes to create art. Today, many others also use modern means of exploring creativity, like video technology, television, and computers. This type of art is called digital art.
Digital art is work made with digital technology or presented on digital technology. This includes images done completely on computer or hand-drawn images scanned into a computer and finished using a software program like Adobe Illustrator. Digital art can also involve animation and 3D virtual sculpture renderings as well as projects that combine several technologies. Some digital art involves manipulation of video images.
The term 'digital art' was first used in the 1980s in connection to an early computer painting program. (This was long before they were called apps, mind you!) It's a method of art-making that lends itself to a multimedia format because it can potentially be viewed in many ways, including on TV and the Internet, on computers, and on multiple social media platforms. In short, digital art is a sort of merger between art and technology. It allows many new ways to make art.
Beginnings of Digital Art
Digital art couldn't really exist without computers. Those machines so familiar to us today got their start in the 1940s, when the first true computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or the ENIAC, was created for military purposes. Artists first began exploring the possibilities of art from computers and related technologies in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Early experiments with computer art came around 1965. German artist Frieder Nake (1938 - present), who also happened to be a mathematician, created a computer algorithm that enabled the machine to draw a series of shapes to make artwork. An algorithm, by the way, is a programmed list of instructions that tells a computer what to do. The resulting computer-generated drawings were some of the earliest examples of art done on a computer.
One of the first truly digital works of art was created in 1967 by Americans Kenneth Knowlton (1931 - present) and Leon Harmon (1922 - 1982). They took a photograph of a nude woman and changed it into a picture composed of computer pixels, titled Computer Nude (Studies in Perception I). A pixel is one small element of an image; when many pixels are combined, they can create a larger, complete image. This nude was one of the first digital artworks.
Growth of Digital Art
By the late 1960s, several museums held exhibits exploring art using computers. Around this same time, several artists began exploring digital technology in multimedia art, using computers, television, video, and other things.
In 1969, artist Allan Kaprow (1927 - 2006), known for art events called happenings, in which the art was a series of activities or actions with audience participation and elements of chance, created a work called Hello in conjunction with a Boston TV station. Centered around several locations in the city, he used TV cameras and sound systems to let people in the different places talk to one another. But Kaprow, from the main control center at the station, would turn the sites on and off, manipulating who could talk to anyone else at a given time. It was one of the first artworks to use television technology to make art.
By the 1980s, computer animation began developing rapidly. In the 1990s, the Internet was born, and digital art continued to evolve. Korean-born artist Nam June Paik (1932 - 2006), sometimes called the 'Father of Video Art,' used television, computer and video technology. He was one of the first artists to use a video camcorder (essentially, a portable video camera) to make art. Paik also worked with video synthesizers that mixed and manipulated moving images from different video sources.
Paik created sculptures and large installations based on electronic media. An installation, by the way, is art that takes up a large area, like a whole room. One of his most well-known works is Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska and Hawaii, created in 1995. It's a 51-channel video installation, with multiple screens set into a neon outline of the United States that take up a large section of wall. Today, you can see it at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
Today, digital art continues to change and evolve as new technologies come into play. Some digital artists work with lighting systems like LEDs; others mix computers and sounds in installation. Digital technology is one more medium for artists to express themselves and explore ideas.
Lesson Summary
Let's take a few moments to review what we've learned…
Digital art is art made by using systems like computers, televisions, and video technology. It was enabled by the development of the first computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC, in the 1940s. In the 1960s, German artist Frieder Nake wrote a computer algorithm, or list of instructions for a computer program, that enabled some of the first drawings done with a computer.
The first truly digital art came in the mid-1960s. Kenneth Knowlton transformed a photo of a woman into a image made of computer pixels, or individual pieces of a graphic that when put together create a whole image. Other artists began using television technology, such as Allan Kaprow, who created happenings, or interactive art events involving the public, in which people were connected using television systems. Additionally, Korean-born artist Nam June Paik mixed multiple digital and media systems in creating art installations, or large works that could take up whole rooms.
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Digital Art | Definition, History & Examples
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