Digital Art by Christiane Paul - Ch. 2

One of the advantages of using digital technologies would be its interaction with the viewers and tendency to respond to every real-time data flow. In digital arts, interactivity takes different forms: navigating, assembling, or contributing to an artwork physically. The possibility of this complex interactivity can be achieved by the technologies’ dynamics. Whenever, the viewer or user clicks something or triggers one specific response, the digital medium can quickly transmit data to the viewers or save changes made by the viewers to the works.

There are many forms of digital arts: movie, video, audio, music, images, websites, and so on. Depending on the forms artists choose, the installation takes different forms. It can be large-scale video installations with multiple projectors or just an Internet Browser. The digital art installations are in and of themselves broad field and come in myriad forms. The installation, alone, change the meanings and the message the artists were trying to depict though their works. For example, the concept of the digital moving images and ‘digital cinema’ have redefined the very identity of cinema. The digital technologies were able to do so because they offer multiple possibilities for an enhanced cinematic representation in installations.

Also, interactivity played crucial role for development in digital cinema arts. Using light in their projection, the artists are now able to allow viewers to interact with even films/videos. The digital arts had been further developed through the advent of World Wide Web. A new genre, Internet Art, allowed the artists to create new forms of expression. Other genre of digital arts is software arts which refers to projects (programs) that have been written by artists from the scratch and run locally on a computer.