Intelligent Visions

Our fine arts were developed; their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.
[PAUL VALERY, PIECES SUR L'ART, “Conquest of Ubiquity”]

The history of art is marked with incessant search for excellence in realistic paintings and sculptures. As artists learned about materials, perspective, anatomy, nature, math, geometry, art became not only a means to please but also “pure and faultless workmanship”. This meant that the virtuosos of each generation took more extensive liberties to embrace the latest established technological breakthroughs of their time to perfect their art. In this way, often, new standards were set for the new generations to come. All this resulted with art having new radical movements, set of revolutionary thoughts or so called “isms”: Classicism, Romanticism, Realism, Neo-Romanticism, Cubist-Realism, Futurism, Constructivism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism etc . Art cannot accommodate the emergence of new art “isms” due to the fact that it has used up the possibility of introducing new revolutionary developments in terms of structure. This however does not deny the individual creativity of the artist: one can combine the already existing notions of different “isms” and link them in a very intriguing way. But that is not enough to be qualified as an innovative visual idiom.

The visual idioms of traditional art are limited in introducing new ways of representing threedimensional material. Even the most skilfulartists are constrained in terms of depth and precision of delineating complicated differences of complex objects. With the help of computers, which are famous for their precision and speed of executing instructions, art can reach new heights by offering extraordinary precision in directing decisive structural factors, image manipulation, and algorithmic automatic generation of objects. It can also be further developed for different interaction scenarios in forms of software.


Digital art is the offspring of a breed of artistic and technical methodologies that have evolved over the centuries. It is the art that is created on a computer in digital form concerned with digitally synthesizing and manipulating visual content. Digital art can be explicitly generated by a computation algorithm in which case the act of creation lays in writing the program, which will make the computer execute a sequence of actions needed to generate the image in a pure algorithmic way with no postprocessing. If the native form of the artwork is stored in computer’s memory than this kind of algorithmic art is called digital art. An example of this is fractal artwork. Emerging with the arrival of computers, this kind of art is the expression of the computer’s virtual soul, and integrating it with the human’s insight can lead it a to a respected place in fine artworks.

Digital art also pertains to art which is dependent on computer technology to achieve its visual representation. It is concerned with acquiring information from scanned sources (digital camera also belongs here since it is a handheld scanner with a lens), treating it as a photograph, and processing it. Photographic manipulation is the application of digital image editing techniques to the acquired scanned information in order to fool the eye by performing “pixel surgery”. It provides unprecedented color manipulation and cutting and pasting of bits of different images to create photo composites. It basically provides a way to produce images which cannot be accomplished with standard photographic tools. Moreover, there are sophisticated digital art programs that simulate the behavior of all the traditional art tools known, enabling the digital artist to achieve the image qualities of traditional tools from one stylus. No time is spent on setting the canvas, mixing paints, testing paints, cleaning brushes, and there are no restrains on last minute experimenting with an artwork, which is something that artists do not dare to do in traditional art scenarios in order to avoid losing a precious artwork.
The digital artist can push his composition to its limit, exploring all the possibilities of improving it to the maximum. All it takes is a certain number of “undo’s” to get back to a safe checkpoint. And once created, the artwork can be easily reproduced and resized to satisfy different needs. Photographic manipulation and natural media software gives the artist time-saving benefits and the possibility to achieve visual structures which are only available through computer-based technology.

The artwork of digital art is only existent as set of binary codes on the lowest level. Binary code consists of a code that computer technology can identify, and in this case the code represents a pixel in an image file. It is the main communication means of the computer, namely before anything is sent to the processor to be executed, it must first be converted to binary code. The digital artwork therefore is coded into a set of precise instructions that the computer should execute. Digital art comes to existence only after it has been decoded onto a monitor or an inkjet print. Output devices such as LCD (liquid crystal displays) projectors, big screen display monitors and inexpensive, high-quality printers changes the way art is experienced as well. Display devices also play a great role in digital art, since the set of binary codes is written to utilize the technologies it is going to be represented on after being processed by the processor. Today’s high level digital art programs take care of all this and separate the user/digital artist from the complex underlying architecture. LCD’s for example store each pixel on the screen by a local voltage and the higher the voltage, the darker the pixel. The CRT (cathode ray tube) uses an electron gun to shoot electrons onto a screen. The electrons are deflected in way that when passed through a mask separating red, green and blue colors, will produce a color when hitting the raster screen. Digital artists take these technological concepts for granted.

This way, by using only binary code, art can be more than just paintings and sculptures. It can be interactive, expressive and intangible, with some works existing only in cyberspace. The creativity of the digital artist is mainly in the dimensions of creating programs using mathematical relations and smart algorithms. This boundless appliance of digital art can result in a counter-movement toward nostalgia and tradition, a resistance to the accelerating rate of change. It is difficult to explain digital art to conventional galleries. However, “We are entering the Age of Integration! The digital artist is the vehicle to that kind of cultural change. We are the first generation of this new breed and we will most surely be remembered for we bring a quake of expression and technique that makes the art world very uncomfortable and that is as it should be."[Gene Hirsch]

Digital art opens new ways for mixed media digital illustration by incorporating drawing, painting, photography and computer-based technology. Digital art’s true power lies in the ability of synthesis, by taking existing forms of traditional art, photography, paint and algorithmic automation, integrating them and creating new revolutionary forms. Using old ideas and techniques, manipulating them, exploring all possibilities of improving the artwork without the risk of losing a precious artwork, being able to go back in time to previous states of the artwork, is of priceless value to the artist and is something that computers can do very fast and are very adept at.


To argue in which ways digital art features extend and even exceed the structural scope of visual representation and the offerings of traditional art, we are going to analyze the improvements digital art offers in terms of structure [Paul Crowther, “The digital image”]. Computers have the capability to define forms with hyper-clarity and sharpness. The machine keeps the lines sharp, the columns straight, and it offers modern techniques to enhance the image quality to the maximum. Different modern techniques are computationally expensive, but with the rapid development of computer hardware, they are not that costly.
One such technique is anisotropic filtering. It is used to improve the image which is at oblique viewing angles. It removes the blur in certain areas to increase the detail in the respected area. This gives the image additional sharpness and level of detail. The machine is also able to give the image unprecedented smoothness. One such technique is anti-aliasing. Scan-converted objects can have the staircase effect which happens due to the discretization of their continuous representation. The way it works is it computes the coverage of a color in a certain pixel, and then applies the color throughout the whole pixel with the saturation level reflecting the coverage. This gives the image additional smoothness and continuity.

Digital art can represent three dimensional objects with unseen precision. Traditional art is limited in this due to the physical impossibility to portray objects and reflection in the precision computers can. 3D graphics can be created via the process of designing complex imagery from geometric shapes, polygonal meshes to create realistic 3 dimensional shapes, objects and scenes. One example is CGI (constructive solid geometry) by which complicated objects are modeled with implicit geometric objects and Boolean operations. Thanks to the immense computational capacity of computers, animation of these objects is also a popular field. One algorithm for managing the depth of objects in a 3D scene is z-buffering. It solves the problem of deciding which objects of the rendered scene are visible and which are hidden (by being occluded by other objects on the scene). The algorithm works by initializing the depth of each pixel of the rendered scene to the maximum depth, and later as soon as a part of some object is included in that pixel, it compares the two depths, and the one that is smaller is the one that gets to be showed on the 2D surface.

To illustrate to what extent computers can reproduce a real life photo, I will briefly explain the photon mapping algorithm which is used to provide global illumination on a scene. By global illumination I mean tracing light rays in real life manner: they can be absorbed, reflected or refracted. Reflected and refracted rays are not with the same intensity, but are further processed and they can again be refracted, reflected or absorbed. The way the algorithm works is that it sends ray from a light source and rays from the camera, and they are traced indefinitely until some termination criteria is met. This is computationally very expensive, but there are optimizations to this algorithm: using a stochastic model, for example the Monte-Carlo approach. Of course, tradeoffs are also introduced by optimizing: the level of reality decreases.

What sets digital art apart from traditional art is that it uses digital technologies as a platform for interactive engagement with its viewer – the viewer becomes a participant. One can argue that this is the contemporary embodiment of Marcel Duchamp’s notion that the viewer completes a work of art. As computer technology is becoming dirt cheap, the use of digital art is becoming central part of human’s visual education. An example for this is Alice, which is a 3D environment that introduces programming concepts using visual storytelling. It also enables the user to create stories by creating his own animations. Another aspect of the interactive side of digital art is the collective authorship of art. It closely resembles the open source movement of computer software. Many people from different places, at different times make improvements, and all the changes are absorbed within the whole. To conclude, digital tools can make art that is easily accessible and affordable. Digital art is a collection of familiar, traditional and potentially boring techniques, but together they make up a synthesis that promises intriguing artworks.

Benjamin Walter’s writing “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction ", disputes that mechanically reproduced art lacks the presence of the original work. He says that the manner and the medium in which human sense perception is organized and accomplished, is determined by nature and historical circumstances as well. He introduces “aura’ as a term defined as unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If a person is being portrayed by looking at a sea and a sunset, he feels the aura of the sea and the sunset at the same time [Benjamin Walter, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction"]. The historical circumstances also make up to the aura. He says that mechanically reproduced artwork lacks the “presence” of the original work and destroys the “aura”. In his time, Benjamin Walter could not witness digital artworks not referring to or reproducing any physical art piece. Digital art as I mentioned above does not exist until it is reproduced on a monitor or print paper. It is just a sequence of binary codes. There can be no original, and no reference to physical object. Also, Walter says that the lack of “presence” in reproducible art is made up by being tied to existence in one place and time, which seriously diminishes accessibility. With digital art, time and place can be determined by the user, and the lack of “presence” can be energized by affordable and no time costly distribution of art.