Shelly Thomas

Karl_Sims[1]

Artificial life and intelligence has been and will continue to be under speculation as the idea of blurring together automatons and human life is often an uncomfortable idea for most people, but advancements are continuously being made in this field.

Samuel Morse sent the first long-distance telegraph message in 1844, which was “What hath God wrought?” The use of the telephone and its usage began to be used in art and open new boundaries for digital artists.

How we define ourselves in virtual as well as physical space has become a prominent theme in digital art in relation to our body identity. Our virtual existence suggests the opposite of a unified body. Ping Body created by Stelarc in 1996 was a devise that extended the artists body through a six-legged walking machine that allowed movements forwards, backwards, and sideways. Ping Body was stimulated by Internet traffic itself.

Dynamic visualization of data flow was established to allow users to navigate visual and textual information and experience changes over time.

The gaming industry has been an important element in the digital art revolution and has grown enormously over the years into the internet medium. Even today, the gaming technology is becoming more refined and better than ever before with more realistic characters and better options.

Linking and networking is important because it comprises the exchange of media files through email, the web, or the networking of people.

All of these characteristics are fundamental to digital art because they are the backbone that keep digital art in place and keep it moving through our society as a network. It has become a vital aspect in our lives and continues to grow everyday.

The different forms of digital art are broken down into specific ideas including installation; film, video, and animation; Internet art and software art; and virtual reality and musical environments.

In installations, many are created environments that immerse the viewers at different levels from a sensed environment in a room to a virtual environment that touches all senses. An example of this that I found very interesting was Jeffery Shaw’s The Legible City in which the visitors navigate their way through a virtual city built of three-dimensional letters while on a stationary bicycle.

Cinema was and is an extremely prominent form of digital art and are constantly changing and adapting. An early form of video and the 3-D world involved the interaction with the viewer in an installation and the installation itself. In Jim Campbell’s Hallucination the viewer would see themselves on the screen as a projected image, but with the use of ‘shadow play’ could view themselves with pieces on fire. This reminded me a lot of Pink Floyd’s cover of Wish You Were Here.

Internet art has gone through several movements through its time, but as time goes on, more and more resources are available to create Internet art. Net art came into creation on the web and opened up a world for artists to display and share their art in an enormous way never seen before. Links made it possible to connect texts and visuals to the contextual network as well.

Software art is very ambiguous in that every form of digital art falls under the guidelines of software art because it was created on the computer.

Virtual reality is still a growing art and is being researched today, but many artists have successfully discovered ways to fully immerse their viewers into their 3-D world.

Art and musical environments has been a subject for centuries, but digital artists today have taken it to a new level by allowing the user to create a masterpiece of music. In this respect, the user would play notes, which would be projected as different colors in front of them to view, creating a unique artwork.

These different forms of digital art show the extreme diversity of digital art itself and the capabilities for the future.

My poster depicted Zeus and the word “addiction”.  So, my first step was to go online and find images of sickly looking people and/or drug addicts. I also found some comic book images of Zeus and used all of these to come up with my basic design.

I drew my image out first and outlined it in ink and then scanned it into the computer. From there, I filled in the colors and text using Photoshop. I initially wanted to do a gradation background, but because I scanned my image, was not able to, so I did a solid color. I went into this project thinking I knew enough about Photoshop to get through it, but realized I knew very little. This became quite a learning experience for me and I am happy with the results of my poster.

This image is considered a cliche because the familiarity of the Rolling Stones icon has been taken away to form a new image; a tongue licking a banana. It removes the familiarity of the object and makes it new, reducing the original meaning. It allows the viewer to question the intent and meaning behind the image when the formal meanings and usage are stripped away.