Digital Media and Ephemeralness: Art, Artist, and Viewer

WHILE HIGH-QUALITY MATERIALS ENABLE PRODUCTION OF EXTREMELY durable artworks, contemporary artists have selected materials and processes that bring about a degeneration of the object. Easy reproduction and faster proliferation of the image mean new ideas are communicated rapidly and each work is considered more briefly by die viewer. Artists’ concepts are incorporated into other pieces, with recendy exhibited work frequendy looked upon as passe. Digitalization produces intangible art, planned rather than crafted by the artist. The temporality, intangibility, and transience drat mark art’s ephemeralness are advanced through cyberspace, where the digital piece is placed on a network, downloaded, manipulated, and placed back on the network by odiers, sometimes simultaneously. Someday the artist may manipulate a program she or he began long ago without recognizing the creator or the creation. The authors trace these developments, widi emphasis on how technology has contributed to the increased ephemeralness of art.