How Technology Is Transforming Art

Jessica Furseth questions – is art experiencing a digital revolution?
The digital world is here, and it’s part of everything we do. As much is clear from the London Barbican show, aptly named “Digital Revolution”, which explores how the rise of digital has influenced creative expression.
But as you walk into the “Digital Revolution” show, one thing quickly becomes clear: digital art doesn’t look very much like what’s in the other art galleries, at least not at first. As technology has changed how art can be created, it’s also changed what art can look like.

As the Barbican show explores the history of digital imagery, it starts in a place that may be surprising: the blocky, basic look of the first video games. In retrospect, this is probably some of the first digital creative expression, even if it didn’t seem like it at the time, as Mario jumped to catch mushrooms and escape colorful turtles.
The Barbican show takes you through this history, from the first blippy examples of increasingly interactive digital images, through to today’s augmented reality and wearable technology.
Only towards the very end of the show, when the Umbrellium display lets you play with three-dimensional light beams that respond to touch, does “Digital Revolution” actually start to resemble traditional art, in the sense that you think of it as art in its own right rather than a digital experience.
Having said that, pointing to a difference between digital images and traditional art is probably a terribly old-fashioned attitude. Art is about pushing boundaries, and in the last couple of decades, nothing has hurled us into the future with quite as much force as technology. It may be a little difficult to predict what’s a fad and what’s part of art history, but maybe fads are history too? Who’s to say the “Emojinal Art Gallery”, a website dedicated to artworks incorporating emoji, won’t be included in a serious art show at the Barbican in another ten years from now? 
Whether or not pasting yellow smiley faces onto classic paintings is your cup of tea, emoji art is arguably an artform because it takes something that’s become a part of everyday life and plays with it. Or look at glitch art, the abstract, colourful images which stem from computer errors. You don’t need to be an artist to make glitch images, as is evident if you look at the “glitch art” tag on Tumblr. But looking at Phillip Stearn’s “Year of the Glitch” project, it may take an artist to make it into art. Stearn takes glitches, many unintentional or found randomly on the Internet, and creates interesting or even beautiful textiles based on the patterns.
“These images are not of broken things, but the unlocking of other worlds latent in the technologies with which we surround ourselves,” says Stearn. “Part of what this project is about is approaching the familiar with fresh senses, to turn it into something that is unfamiliar.”
A desire to look beyond digital gimmicks was also probably a reason why the rewriting of “American Psycho” into Google Ads received praise instead of ridicule. Artists Mimi Cabell and Jason Huff tackled the Bret Easton Ellis classic by emailing the book to one another, one page at the time, and re-writing it by collecting the ads that appeared next to the emails. The re-print has the original titles and chapter headings, but the rest is the ads, creating an oddly poignant commentary.
The artists were most curious about how the targeted advertising would deal with the book’s violence and graphic language. “The ad for Crest Whitestrips Coupons appeared the highest number of times, next to both the most graphic and the most mundane sections of the book, leaving no clear logic as to how it was selected to appear,” said Cabell. “This ‘misreading’ ultimately echoes the hollowness at the center of advertising and consumer culture, a theme explored in excess in ‘American Psycho’.”
Of course, not every piece of digital expression will become art someday, as the person who paid $90,000 in an eBay auction for a screenshot may well discover. Even though the text on this now-famed screenshot provides a fittingly ironic comment: “Art used to be something to cherish / Now literally anything could be art / This post is art.”
However, whatever way you look at it, it’s obvious that the most recent tendencies of introducing technology to art have matured greatly from the first generation of avant-gardist, whose tendency is was to hack the unfamiliar mediums in order to represent their ideas; essentially using old tricks with a new substance. Now, with the use of 3d printing, responsive and dynamic lighting, and reality augmentation, a strong sense of craftsmanship is returning to art. This results in digital art no longer being ” a collection of beautiful things” based on its representation, but a crafted experience that can transport the viewer almost physically in to the artist’s design in a similar way to garden mazes and mechanical theaters of the past.
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