digital

Art is such a personal thing that I am not sure this question can be answered completely. For me art is something that I personally think to be beautiful, something that makes me think about the world or see something from another perspective. Art is no longer a painting or a drawing, the evolution of technology has meant that it now covers a light show or immersive, interactive experiences (anyone experience The Curiosity Cloud as part of London Design Festival last month?). For me there is something transient about the meaning of art, not just the work hanging on gallery walls or the editions being sold by artists worldwide but in the more every day designs we encounter. It used to be that only oil paintings or sculptures were considered to be art, now it can be anything. Previously the only ephemeral art form was flyers or posters pasted on a wall, perhaps this is still true but digital art also has ephemeral qualities, yet at the same time it has permanence. If you missed a light show or projection on the side of a building, that’s it, it’s gone, but YouTube can help you capture the essence of the experience. People collect posters, flyers and postcards because they like the way they look. You can spend hours working on a digital painting only to have the file corrupt on you when you try and open it again – not only a lesson in remembering to back up multiple file versions but also an example of how temporary the digital landscape can be. Recreating that painting is possible but starting from scratch means that not every pixel will be in the same place as before. [...]