Work metadata
- Year Created: 2014
- Submitted to ArtBase: Wednesday Dec 17th, 2014
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Work Credits:
- mcmo9445, primary creator
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Artist Statement
Through the Multimedia Era, comes Digital Art where interactivity between artists and audiences have transformed our idea of “art.” My series is a reproduction of historical art movements like, Impressionism, abstraction, and cubism. I took the concepts of each art movement and reconstructed paintings from Claude Monet,Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, and Piet Mondrian, with a digital interpretation. In doing so I have appropriated various images from the internet and transferred them through existing codes to exemplify this new form of art history. The digital art movement essentially has taken historical art practices of color, composition, technique, and narrative, and combined all these revolutionary techniques and concepts of the time period by classifying them under one scope, and that is digital art.
Like these various artists of each movement, digital art has changed the definition of artistic language and appreciation. Like abstract art, digital art allows simplified elements to be recognized as a new form of universal aesthetic language. Like the Cubists, digital art too, has continued to redefine the concept of realism by using the technology of the twenty-first century. Like the cubist language, the digital language seeks to address reality through the internet and how artists can converse through technology through many digital mediums. Lastly, like the Impressionists, the digital art community challenges assumptions of “good” art by bypassing all limitations and institutional boundaries. All these conceptual ideas executed throughout art history tie into the digital art movement in many ways.
Similar to Digital art, the early modern art movement encouraged artist invention rather than criticizing artists for their lack of traditional painting techniques. For instance, Kim Cascone’s article, The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music, she explains how the internet influenced this new movement in digital music and how it welcomed anyone to create. What’s so revolutionizing in Internet art is that you don't need to have formal education to be involved. The medium of digital technology can be self-taught, therefore according to Cascone, “The medium is no longer the message; rather, specific tools themselves have become the message.” In Art and the Internet, Nick Lambert addresses the institution of art and Internet art by analyzing the digital art as a medium that defies these institutional limitations. Digital art can be presented in any form, thus it is often negatively critiqued in a museum setting. Although, because the digital art medium is open to the public on an international network, it should be seen as a way of challenging the social hierarchies that art is often structured on.
What I’m trying to convey through these digital reproductions of historical paintings is how digital art should be acknowledged as a new form of art that has taken all revolutionary and innovative concepts of the past art movements and integrated them into one universal medium independent of institutional art norms. Every art movement relies on the technology available during that time, thus why is digital art viewed on an inferior level? Why is culture still hesitant to understand the digital art world? Perhaps, as I recreate famous paintings from each movement I will too, help contemporary culture understand that digital art is just as significant as paintings, sculptors, prints, and drawings. Digital art allows all of these techniques to collaborate into one medium that is applicable for all groups of people.