“The computer has become invisible. I’m totally focused on my work, on the brushes and on the digital colors as a medium to reach my creative goal”. And more: “To paint with the mouse is like painting while looking in a mirror - there’s no physical contact. I miss the thickness of the brush stroke and the coarseness of the canvas. There’s no presence”.  A few lines below: “Whatever is the medium that inspired the art, its originality is in the content, not in the medium itself”.

These antithetical opinions are just a few that can be read online in the forum page opened by The New York Times on art created with the aid of the computer. They are thoughts formulated  by artists, museum curators or everyday people, but never expressed or  picked up by the press because they deal with a subject that can only be viewed online or with the aid of a modem and monitor. Yet these comments have indeed contributed to the ongoing discussion of what has by now become a new way of doing art, known by any of the following names: net.art, digital.art or new media art,  among others.

No matter what we call this new art form, the energy surrounding it is huge. It shouldn’t be otherwise, considering that big institutions - like Walker Art Center, the Whitney and the Guggenheim, to name just a few  - have already opened or are considering opening sections dedicated to Digital Art.

These new artists must master a medium that requires more than a knowledge of simply mixing pigments and adding thinners. In fact, one could say that the canvas dries up as soon as the enter button is hit. For this reason,  digital artists tend to come from diverse backgrounds - some have spent years creating with brushes and spatulas, others were perhaps novelists, and still others may have been fashion designers.

Native-born Australian Simon Biggs is presently Professor of Research at the Art and Design Research Center of the Sheffield Hallam University in Sheffield, Great Britain. He has always been a painter and a sculptor, and for over 20 years he has been using the computer as a language to communicate. For Biggs, the computer remains a way to do and to dare, and the technology, no matter how useful and amusing it is, shouldn’t be a defining factor for an artist. The computer allows Biggs to mingle words and images in a way that has had international repercussions. The Great Wall of China, one of his biggest web works, can be viewed on CD-ROMs, in print and online, because “if the art is made with the computer, the Net is a communication medium that gives one the sense of community, but confusing the Net with computers is a big mistake. It's like confusing the telephone with writing”.

Mark Amerika has a different opinion. Musician, movie director and novelist, he considers that “network art is work that is created exclusively for the Internet and cannot be successfully realized in any other medium”.  But, like Biggs, he is definitely enthusiastic of the flexibility of this new medium.  In his pieces, Amerika combines music and text, believing that “language is the source code of the Digital Being and words are the material of the spiritual unconscious”. Books give Amerika pleasure because they are very complex works of art “that try to make something new, though the literary medium is already outmoded and becoming more irrelevant”. On the contrary, the web projects give him "greater pleasure  because they are intimately connected to a global network of artists and sophisticated net-surfers with who I can play virtually, in cyberspace, and in real life”. Amerika’s pieces of art are absolutely dynamic, never could be printed and need the public interaction. It’s the power of impulse that makes Mark create Digital Art: “I can not *not* do it. It will change your life if you let it “. Digital art is very liberating because it is composed of fluid ones and zeroes and can be changed at any time.  I love re-visioning my work, manipulating both the art work and the artist mythology. With material mediums like paint or print, you are always stuck with what you created, even if you yourself have moved on to other lives.  Now the technology has to keep up with my mind!”.

Even if art is not shown on the Net, it’s undoubtedly true that the computer is very flexible in the hands of any artist. Giorgio Baroni, an Italian from Milan, has studied at art school and fashion school as well as having spent wo years as a fashion designer. He abandoned everything for the computer, for the pleasure of freedom: textiles and fabrics constricted his imagination. “Now I can freely decide about the lights and the forms.” In this way, Baroni has now freed himself from Nature’s physical laws, such as brightness, shade and contrast,  and he can inform the public about the things-of-the-world. A self-declared pop artist, Baroni believes that “the objects around us talk”, including the soles of shoes, the hair clips, even the  cotton swabs. And, when Baroni looks for a trait- d’union between new and classic, there's the Madonna of Cable, made with the computer and digitally framed in a very mannerist relief.

But not even Baroni’s Madonna would attract to the digital medium all those people who miss the pungent smell of the thinner or the thickness of the oil on the canvas. Astrophysicist and adventurer Jon Ippolito, who is now the curator at the Soho Guggenhein, New York comments, “Smearing tubes full of alizarin and titanium with a palette knife is an incredibly seductive process.” But don't be mistaken -  the lack of the physical doesn’t stall Ippolito’s creativity. He sees the digital as a means for freedom of expression in an art form which moves faster than the critics' mind, and he hopes that this new medium will also give new life to sculpture and painting. An artist who seems to be ready to go back to her origins after a few common works with the Ippolito-Cohen-Frank trio is Janet Cohen: “After working in new media art for the past few years, and after much thought on the matter, I have concluded that new media are not media I choose to work in. Art and digital media are not a good match. I don't like looking at art on monitors. The absence of the physical aspect so often found in new media art is something I find disturbing, particularly in the distancing effect it has on one's experience of the artwork”.

And the latter statement is the greatest argument against digital art. As already stated, what’s missing is the physicality of the piece, whether it be a painting or a sculpture, and even more so the absence of the hand and sweat. There are no color-stained hands, but there is the knowledge of software, and this is the new gesture, the new action. Maybe new artists have to be computer geeks, or at least have some knowledge, but this is not a limitation of artistic expression. On the contrary. Digital Art isn’t exclusively for the eyes: multimedia is often king. Images move, lights and colors pop while music flows through the speakers and the public is often required to interact. The critics talk about a pseudo-artifact, something that doesn’t exist at all because one can simply unplug the computer and lose everything. Here we encounter another discussion topic: the originality of a piece of art. Does it make sense to talk about original work when, with a simple double click, the file, and the piece of art, can be saved and copied an endless number of times. Everybody with a modem and a computer can claim to own a copy of a digital art work, or is it the real original?

When flat monitors will be inexpensive and big, people will go online for an “art quest” and be able to change the art collection on their living room walls accordingly to their mood or to their dinner guests’ taste. At that moment, art’s value will be in the idea’s originality and in the artist’s execution. “The very fact that there is no unique original in digital work could seal its death certificate,” says Keith Frank, who continues: “In this age of fetishistic art collection, this type of work may never find a home. If digital work doesn't survive, it will just reaffirm the art world's commitment to market value over artistic value”. Amerika, very tersely, affirms that “Copyright is dead.  I prefer something else I call copyleft, as in "to leave a copy," but also as in leftist politics, the politics of pleasure and social fulfillment over the politics of corporate consciousness and intellectual property”. It is very likely that it is the lack of originality that prevented, until now, the big museums from acquiring a digital art piece, and, in so doing, inaugurating the art market. But is a market really needed to appreciate a gesture that gives image or sound to an idea?

Innovations are difficult to accept, and digital art is not an exception. But help toward comprehending new artistic media comes, undoubtedly, from the space that museums are making for it. Museums have a social role, and a physicality, that won’t be overcome by the Net for a long time to come.

Probably critiques toward digital art, positive or negative as they could be, are wrong in essence. Critics try to define using similarities and differences, but they forget that this new specific art expression is totally changing the way to look at art. That’s why nobody has foreseen a trend, or better, as Biggs says, digital art will “  …disturb the self, critique the status quo, destabilize what we think things are” … hey, but this is “real” Art.

Michael Molinari