Digital Image—Digital Cinema: The Work of Art in the Age of Post-Mechanical Reproduction

Computers are transforming existing art forms and allowing new kinds of art forms to be developed. Because the computer is primarily a machine for processing information, not a machine for making objects, it provides a malleable medium that provides the artist with a large variety of tools for manipulating sense data. The work that contains the result of the artist’s creativity is the software and the data, not any particular image or output produced using that software. The ultimate goal of artmaking using computers, in this light, is not to create art objects but to create dynamic art subjects, to produce families of aesthetically interesting outputs, or art performances, which are as different from each other as possible within the constraints of the software. This situates computer art within the larger context of the study and development of artificial life. To create significant artworks of this type, it will be necessary to improve the computer’s capacity to be an autonomous artmaking subject; this will require the extension of the computer’s senses, the expansion of its capabilities, and means for the computer to provide sensory inputs to the human nervous system and to other computers.