-
Period: to
The beginnings of digital art
Digital art couldn't really exist without computers. Those machines so familiar to us today got their start in the 1940s, when the first true computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or the ENIAC, was created for military purposes. Artists first began exploring the possibilities of art from computers and related technologies in the late 1950s and early 1960s. -
Experimenting with computers
Early experiments with computer art came around 1965. German artist Frieder Nake (1938 - present), who also happened to be a mathematician, created a computer algorithm that enabled the machine to draw a series of shapes to make artwork. An algorithm, by the way, is a programmed list of instructions that tells a computer what to do. The resulting computer-generated drawings were some of the earliest examples of art done on a computer. -
The first composition
One of the first truly digital works of art was created in 1967 by Americans Kenneth Knowlton (1931 - present) and Leon Harmon (1922 - 1982). They took a photograph of a nude woman and changed it into a picture composed of computer pixels, titled Computer Nude (Studies in Perception I). A pixel is one small element of an image; when many pixels are combined, they can create a larger, complete image. This nude was one of the first digital artworks. -
Evolution in tech
Artists began to explore the results of the connectivity made by TV, recording equipment and nascent computers. The idea of universal communicability would later be discovered when mobile phones and the internet were introduced. This era started a development in technologies (such as the Apple ll computer which allowed color graphics to be executed for the first time on the screen of a personal computer. -
First digital art program
The first use of the term digital art was in the early 1980s when computer engineers devised a paint program which was used by the pioneering digital artist Harold Cohen. This became known as AARON, a robotic machine designed to make large drawings on sheets of paper placed on the floor. Since this early foray into artificial intelligence, Cohen continued to fine-tune the AARON program as technology becomes more sophisticated. -
Andy Warhol
It's difficult to mention digital art without mentioning Warhol. In 1985, Warhol became a Commodore representative, agreeing to create digital art on an Amiga 1000 to help advertise the computer. His 28 digital "experiments" were nearly lost until 2014, but artist Cory Arcangel worked with the Warhol Museum and the Carnegie Mellon University Computer Club to recover the files. -
What is Digital art
