Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Research question 1: What are the merits and demerits of Art in Digital Age?

Here I am trying to answer the first research question which combines the infomation and bibliography I read so far.
What is digital art?
Digital art is art created on a computer in digital form.
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_art
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*an example of Digital Art from a informative website http://digitalart.org/

Merits
The establishment of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s affect every society in the world both positively and negatively. It has open up a rich and exciting range of opportunities in the visual arts, giving a new media for the artists to create a new form of Art.

In this digital age, the best part of the Digital Art is the information can be spread easily in a much quicker time period. Anyone owning a computer and an Internet access can experience mass works of art from anywhere in the world. This allows more eyes to be opened to the importance of art in culture and society as well as enables more individuals to experience the personal benefits of viewing or interacting with art and it becoming more and more powerful gradually. The large audiences capable of being reached allow for Digital Art artists to spread their influence quickly.

Moreover, art in Digital Age enable an important new form of cooperation between the artists and the viewers, this is not an one-way direction but both audiences and the artists could act and react so as to achieve a higher rate of creation. And I will talk in-deep of this kind of collaborative culture later on.

Demerits
Although there are many positive sides of the Digital Art movement, there are a couple of shortcomings as well. Preservation of the Digital artwork is the most difficult task in the computer world. We can go to museums, galleries, auction houses, etc., in order to see the Art in the physical world. But, digital art is not a “physical creation.” It requires software, and hardware to view it. It is hardly to preserve a work permanently and not to be removed by a web master in the Computer world. For example, when I try look up a net call International Festival of Streaming Media:
http://net.congestion.org/ which showed by a book published in 2000 that I borrowed from LN library, but I find out that the site is removed, so where are the works from the net? Can I trace them back?

It is important to find a way to solve this problem so as to starving to reach its maturity of the Digital Art. Another question need to be addressed is that the authority of the work, It is ture that there is no forgery in Digital world, the Internet brings users an ease with which they can appropriate other people’s intellectual productions. Most Digital Art artists use others’ art in order to make their own is a big excitement of creation, but this still is stealing and needs to be informed. Is it open to all for collaborate? What can I do if i find out someone copy and amend my work? More must be done to ensure that individual’s intellectual property rights are protected.

There are still rooms to improve the art in Digital world. New advancements such as increasing technological breakthroughs in the Internet and the ability to send more and more information will continue to allow artists to evolve in their powerful creations. I deeply believe that we can see the maturity and all the drawbacks could be solved of Digital Art one day.

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