Reading Entry #3

For my third and final reading for the semester, I wanted to take a more comprehensive look at the history of digital art as a whole, and I came across this article on the V&A website that gave a more or less succinct yet abbreviated history of the practice and how its developed. https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/digital-art

My favorite types of digital art are the pieces that embellish the real world within the context of art. For me, this is most apparent from the 1960’s period where the art world collaborated with the world of science to inform patterns and repetitions like you would see in a data set. I am very much infatuated with the piece “Structures of Squares” plotter drawing done by Vera Molnar and included in the article. To me, this a near perfect example of imbuing the art world and the world of science together as the recorded patterns reveal very avant garde yet modern forms like you would see in the context of digital art today. 

Another instance of this sense of art mimicking the real or more specifically the hyper real is David Em’s “Approach”. I wanted to talk about this piece because to me it reads like the genesis of all computer generated graphics. Additionally, I make a lot of associations with this art to the operating system Windows and the artwork that is proprietary to the software (at least in the 90’s). I like this kind of stuff because I think it’s interesting to see where everything begins, especially accounting for hardware limitations, especially in an era where people are now trying to mimic these said limitations to “saturate” their art so to speak.