Digital Art...?

The world of art has a rich and colourful history. From the dawn of time, art styles and techniques have changed drastically, reflecting social, political, and philosophical changes throughout the ages. And now, as we count down to the end of one millenium and the beginning of another, a new art form is beginning to emerge, fueled this time by a technological revolution that has left nothing unchanged in its wake. The media is pixels painted on by countless ones and zeroes, showcased in a museum known as the Internet. Yes, digital art has arrived.

Well, digital art itself isn't that new. However, computer graphics have come a long way since this time last decade. And, with the ever-increasing popularity of the Internet, people all over the world download literally millions upon millions of graphics every day. But, until recently, not much thought has been put into the artistic quality of this multitude of graphics. People create graphics for the Internet that look cool, in order to attract more people to their sites and to increase the chances that a web surfer will click on your nifty looking banner ad. So what would one think of creating a complex web site, not for e-commerce, not for an online community, not for any kind of research or educational purpose whatsoever, but just for the art of it all?

"Preposterous!" "A sacrilege!" "Blasphemy!" People said similar things about the Renaissance. "It'd be as silly as taking a $3000 computer apart to make an abstact sculpture, or having Frank Lloyd Wright design a Glaxo-Wellcome laboratory!" Er... not quite. "But what's the point?"

Expression, the same reason that has driven the arts this far already. Paintings, sculptures, and other art pieces have expressed emotion and commented on this ever-changing world for centuries. And now a new world is emerging, bringing along with it a new society and new ideas which are an amalgamation of all those from the world of times past. At first, these ideas were expressed only in simple monochrome text and often in scientific terms. But, as this new world has progressed from a scientist's information superhighway to a worldwide entertainment source, the format these ideas have been expressed in has changed to include a plethora of colours and fonts, graphics, audio, and video. Now, all these elements, combined with the authoring languages of the Internet, have combined to create sites that are nothing but showcases of art.

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