In 2024, digital art is everywhere. We have the ability to record and manipulate still and moving images, draw and paint, and even generate elaborate art by having a conversation with a device that most of us have with us all the time. This wasn't the case just 50 years ago. Digital art existed but was limited by access to huge machines that were very expensive and required special skills to use.
Digital Capture: Southern California and the Pixel-Based Image World, the current exhibition at UCR Arts, explores the short history of digital art from complex formulas generating simple images to advanced interfaces that blur the line between who and what the creators are. The exhibition is appealing on so many levels. The ties to the origins of digital art and Southern California's place in the computer revolution that took place during the Cold War.
There is an appeal to nostalgia, a sort of digital kitsch that runs very strong throughout the show. The difference between what we thought about the future and what it came to be is jarring, both in terms of how right and wrong we were in our forecasts. The contrast is easy to see.
What hasn't changed about art in the digital era is even more interesting. I suppose it's counterintuitive to say the artistic community can be quite conservative, but like all communities, the techniques and conventions that are held dear are not easily released. All art forms deal with technology, and the old guard almost always sees the ways of their replacement as something less than what they have done.
The irony is much more is the same than what has changed. The compositions and forms of the classical masters are still there, though the means have changed. The observer still values balance and direction as much on their phone screens as they do for oil on canvas.
Art has endured this revolution many times. The abstractors look for beauty beyond technique and medium and carve away what they see as unnecessary to bring something "pure" more clearly into view.
What is explicit in historical and contemporary accounts is the question begged about the future. What is next with digital art? What does making art look like in an AI world where so much is done with decreasing interface and agency? Is there promise in the idea of a perfect image that has been restrained by personality?
The Classists believed that there was a most beautiful shape derived from the most beautiful ratio, and their job was simply to discover and reproduce it. Can enough data be collected about what we find pleasing that, unbound from the limitations of being human, we can produce ecstasy in our images? Does it have to look like nature, or can it be done while eschewing representation and deriving the combinations of small dots and thin lines that strike something beyond the romanticism of the artist as a beauty communicator?
Digital Capture is worth a visit for its aesthetics alone. The range of style and form is remarkable. The artists' questions, individually and collectively, about how we interface with creativity are also very compelling. There are images that may not be suitable for younger or sensitive viewers, but they are well-marked and easy to avoid. Check here for more information and exhibition hours.
