The Digital Revolution: Art in the Computer Age

Since its first artistic application nearly thirty years ago, the computer has radically transformed the way in which art can be made and experienced. Digital technology has been incorporated into all stages of the art-making process, from design to execution. Even the milling of sculpture and the spraying of paintings can be computer controlled. Early computer graphics were pretty much restricted to black-and-white, linear representations of mathematical principles and had little aesthetic interest. A. Michael Noll's Gaussian Quadratic of 1965 is typical of the early work in the field (fig. 1). Unlike many other computer scientists who produced graphics, however, Noll had a strong interest in the history of art, and he appropriated many modern masterworks. He was fond of pointing out, for example, the similarity between his Gaussian Quadratic and Picasso's Ma Jolie in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which he frequently visited.