Themes in Digital Art:

(Chapter 3 Response)

Digital technology has become a medium, in turn narrowing the relationship between man and machine, creating new possibilities for artists, and new ways for the viewer to interact or view the mysterious digital artworks of today.
A great example of this Thomas Ray's (b 1954) Tierra (1998) because it is what the book calls an artificial life project based on nature and it "neither allows direct interaction by user nor specific visual components." This is an example of taking something conceptually natural and recreating the components digitally. Creating a new and unique way for the viewer to experience nature in the digital medium.

Process for project 3

To embrace the digital aesthetic I chose to make album art for my recent music productions. About 7 Months ago I started producing digital music in the program called Ableton Live 8. I Figured I needed to have some visuals with my music. You can find my music and album art at

Process: Glance further down the page at the image with the eyes, titled "must stay awake." First I took this image that I previously warped and created in photoshop, and opened up the filter gallery in photoshop and applied a few filters/textures at a time. I exported the image for a few different versions as JPEGs and brought them back into photoshop and a applied more filters. After a few layers of liquify and color correction, I used the brush and blending tools to finalize each image.

Process vs. End Result in Digital Art

Usually the process is more meaningful to the artist and other artists viewing the piece. However as some people become more comfortable with the digital aesthetic the process becomes more questionable yet less meaningful to the end result. For other's it is the opposite, were are they can do as they view the piece is question the process "I wonder how the artist did that?" For me, "Ultimately, any experience of an artwork is interactive, relying on a complex interplay between contexts and productions of meaning at the recipients' end" (67). To me this means, that most viewers don't need to know the process of how a piece of art is created. For the viewer the artworks is more about how they can interact with it, and how they can relate to it.

Embracing the Digital Aesthetic

At the beginning of this school year, I started digitally producing music (if that is what you want to call it). I have been uploading some of my recent compositions on soundcloud.com. With each upload there is an option for album art, project three gave me the push to create some digital art for my digital music. To put my project in context, you can find my music and "album art" [haha] at soundcloud.com/droplitz. Download, comment, lemme know if you like my beginner music.

My process and resource images for the last project.

First I found the image of the room on google by researching "destroyed Detroit homes."
The image of the boy playing on the ground, I actually took this picture in 2007 at the Denver Chalk Drawing Festival
The castle comes from a series of another artist, but I appropriated this castle into the picture because it fits the project perimeters of " Fabrication" Like the boy is constructing the little castle.
As for the eye in the window, I also just googled "eye"

In this project I was going for a whimsical seen of a boy constructing or fabricating a castle.
Process:
Set the room as the background. Then created a new layer for castle, then the boy. I used a series of layers of the boy and castle so that the boy would look like he is building the castle, In this project I learned that the more layers the better. Then I moved on to the window and the eye. I first selected the window and moved it to a new layer, replacing the nature in the widow with an eye. I warped the eye to fit the window. Then I created the light source from the eye on a new layer by drawing a shape where I thought the light might fall, and filled it in the white, lowered the transparency and dissolved it with the blending options. I created the shadow for the boy and the castle the same way I did the light source. After burning and dodging the room for more shadows and highlights, I exported the image as a jpeg, and brought the image back into cs5 and used some filters and color adjustments in order to unify the color pallet of the image as whole.

"No Title" is the title

Digital Manipulation: Medium? Credibility...

Many people today can usually notice if an artist has used digital resources to construct their compositions, does this make the piece of art or the artist less credible? Not unless the artist acknowledges the use of the medium, “The fact that the digital medium allows for seem less reconstruction and manipulation of reality seems to have heightened an awareness of the questionable nature of the authenticity of all images” (p. 36). I believe that Digital manipulation counts as medium and the artist that has used the digital resource to aid them in the process of creating a piece of art does not loose credibility as long as he or she doesn’t deny the obvious use of the medium in their because just as it takes practice and knowledge to draw, paint, or do any other traditional medium, digital art also takes practice and knowledge of the program therefor it is a medium. However, it is the artist that denies their use of digital resources that looses credibility.