about digital art essay

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“How Artists Can Bridge the Digital Divide and Reimagine Humanity”

By agnes chavez.

Photo courtesy of Agnes Chavez

A 10,000-square-foot inflatable  Space Cloud with a floor made of ten tons of white salt drifting like beach sand, illuminated with programmable LED lights, lands in a park in Taos—a small, rural, multicultural community in New Mexico. Inside, plankton as large as whales drift on the fabric surfaces of the dream-like cloud, while participants wearing virtual reality headsets paint in three-dimensional space.

The inflatable pavilion designed by Espacio La Nube transformed into a learning space for the integrated STEMarts youth program at the 2018 PASEO Festival. We welcomed 700 students from across Taos County, giving them the opportunity to look under the hood and hear from the artists how the magic is created through the merging of art, science, and technology. As one student participant put it, “Now I know what is possible!”

The STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics) movement has been an important catalyst to develop digital literacy skills in education. To achieve an inclusive and equitable digital society, however, we must broaden the definition of STEAM even further to include the development of humanistic skills and sustainable “ futures thinking ” through community-engaged projects. This is especially critical in rural and underserved communities where we are facing a gender, race, and culture gap in the field of science and technology. These gaps in digital arts continue to be a challenge in curation.

The STEMarts Lab, founded in 2009, designs installations and artist-embedded curricula that focus on the intersection of the arts, humanities, and philosophy with science and technology. Through immersive and educational sci-art experiences, students work directly with artists whose work imagines what can be achieved with digital technologies. In contrast to an approach that assumes that any social problem has a technological solution, this collaboration empowers our youths and communities to understand the ethics behind new technologies and their impact on nature and humanity, while giving them the tools they need to creatively engage in and with society.

New media artists can play a pivotal role

New media artists have much to contribute to closing the “ digital divides .”  We live in a society that is fast-changing and increasingly reliant on digital technologies. To fully participate in this new society and reap its rewards, it is crucial to not only bridge the "first-level” digital divide of access to and affordability of information and communication technologies (ICT), but also to address the “second-level” digital divide, called the “production gap.” Filling this gap would give people around the world the necessary knowledge and skills to move collectively from being consumers of digital content to producers of it. Currently, the majority of user-generated content is created by a small group of elites. Therefore, it is critical to provide the diverse sectors of our communities with the skills to produce their own content.

But providing access alone—or even closing the production gap—will not help us solve our most complex problems. In order to be effective, as Jan A.G.M Van Dijk notes in The Digital Divide , “policies must simultaneously reduce existing social and digital inequalities.”

Bridging the multiple divides is an essential part of this process.  The United Nations’ Roadmap for Digital Cooperation outlines “key areas for action.” I focus on three of them below—digital capacity-building, digital public goods, and digital inclusion—and I show how collaborating with digital creatives through transdisciplinary educational initiatives can offer exciting new approaches and strategies to address these unique challenges.

The National Endowment for the Arts’ report, Tech as Art: Supporting Artists Who Use Technology as a Creative Medium , affirms that “Tech-centered artists are admirably poised to grapple with larger societal and sectoral challenges—whether engaging with audiences during the COVID-19 pandemic or responding to calls for greater equity and inclusion in the arts and technology. They can be invaluable partners for policy-makers, educators, and practitioners in arts and non-arts sectors alike."

• Digital capacity-building: Harnessing wonder

SPACE was the concept I explored for the 2018 PASEO Festival with curatorial advisors, Ariane Koek and Dr. Anita McKeown . The festival’s free youth program investigated inner and outer space, artistically, socially, and scientifically, and highlighted the role of art, science, and technology in contemplating our place in nature and re-imagining society. In YouthDay@Space Cloud , students from each of Taos County’s schools visited virtual reality stations by NoiseFold and Reilly Donovan where they experienced otherworldly landscapes, and a GPS interactive installation by Parker Jennings that transported them into outer space and back. Through Victoria Vesna ’s hacked gaming technology, they also learned of the destructive power of noise pollution on our oceans.

Through this artist-led experiential learning, students gain insight in the artists’ ways of knowing—sensory, embodied, visual, kinesthetic—which prioritize the creative and human connection to technology. Teachers visited the online STEMarts Curriculum Tool in advance to learn more about the artists so that they arrived ready to ask questions. Follow-up surveys showed that students found the experience positive and fun, and were curious to learn more about art, science, and digital technology. Years later, they still ask if “the bubble” is coming back.

The power of fun should not be underestimated. The Digital Divide affirms that fostering a positive attitude for using digital media is an important first step for closing the digital divide. Another strategy is making a long-term commitment to the community. Annual festivals create more impact than one-off events. Over six years of producing the PASEO Festival, we watched student, educator, and local government engagement grow. Community members stepped up to volunteer at the festival and learn from the artists. Teachers became proactive and asked for artists to come into their classroom to do hands-on workshops. Students continued to use the free digital tools.

One teacher was so excited by artists/activists Illuminator Collective ’s urban projection workshop that, a year later, she and her students created a protest to save the Arts Endowment in Taos Plaza. Students and teachers who have been participating since the first STEMarts programs at ISEA2012: Machine Wilderness , are now furthering their skills as content creators, teaching or mentoring others, pursuing new media arts fields, or simply walking away with a greater understanding of how they can become creative participants in this new digital society.

• Digital public goods: Creating shareable resources

New media artists are at the forefront of inventing and adapting what the UN roadmap calls “digital public goods”— such as open-source software or open data — to create new digital creation tools. Through the STEMarts youth programs built around artist installations, we are cultivating a new pool of creative thinkers who see the possibilities of these open tools and how to use them. These strategies help participants in underserved communities move from being passive consumers of technology to cultural producers, empowered with the technology to tell their own stories.

As an example, Space Messengers is an immersive and educational sci-art exhibition as part of an international youth exchange program in partnership with U.S. embassies. Students in participating countries use artist-created tools to contribute content for the exhibition that travels to festivals around the world. For this installation, artist and openFrameworks programmer Roy MacDonald wrote the code for the web-based Space Board platform and integrated the (x)trees algorithm. This allows students to co-write their science-informed messages and the audience to respond in real time with their own messages from their devices. Both students and the public experience the excitement of learning science and contributing content as part of a real or virtual reality environment. These open-source tools are available for artists to adapt on GitHub .

In another science collaboration, Taos students learn from artist Markus Dorninger how to use his free Tagtool app, which transforms an iPad into a live visual instrument to tell their stories. With this tool, anyone can connect their iPad to a projector and paint with light, create animated graffiti, or tell improvised stories in multiplayer sessions using their fingers or stylus, eliminating the need for computers and mapping software.

• Digital inclusion: The STEMarts Model

The STEMarts model (see below) builds youth programming around four pillars:

• 21st-century skills and technology
• Cutting-edge science knowledge
• Real-world application and collaboration
• New media arts and social practice

We explore how an understanding of art, science, and technology expands our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to nature and society. We do this by building partnerships and co-designing with universities, science institutions , community organizations, and all levels of government to integrate diverse perspectives and discover new approaches.  The curriculum, board, and advisors for these projects comprise an international and interdisciplinary team of artists, scientists, and cultural specialists that are actively contributing their knowledge—for example, CoDesRes and its STEAM place-based learning interventions and artist, Andrea Polli with STEAM NM. As another example, Dr. Greg Cajete , consultant and author of the book Native Science: Laws of Interdependence , is instrumental in the integration of traditional ecological knowledge. Deeply engaging diverse community members as collaborators in the creation of the workshop, installation, or festival is key to assuring that a wide range of people have equal access to the knowledge and skills, and a platform to share their stories.

Providing free online resources supports access for rural and underserved communities. The STEMarts Curriculum Tool is an online resource that provides teachers with no-cost content for building STEAM activities around the work of participating new media artists, while providing such artists with opportunities to share their work and knowledge with educators and the community. COVID-19 has been a catalyst to get schools and cultural institutions up to speed with internet and computer access, making these free artist-built resources a powerful way to address diversity in the second-level digital divide.

Why this matters now more than ever

We face unprecedented challenges, and if we are to create equitable responses, we must begin to develop numerous literacies. Students can develop understanding and empathy while exploring the applications of science and technology in our societies. They do not need to end up working in related fields to benefit from acquiring humanistic and scientific literacy—and ensuring that they do so will in turn benefit society and the world.

Creating an equitable and sustainable digital society is an essential process that calls for what the United Nations refers to as “digital cooperation”: an ecosystem approach of multistakeholder collaborations between private sector, public sector, academia, and civil society. The need to bring people together from diverse disciplines and cultural perspectives to create alternative futures is urgent.  In a world of complexity and constant change, no one approach is sufficient. Pioneering artists experimenting with technologies can play an important role fostering literacies and bridging social divides. By supporting these artists creating new digital tools and experiences, we allow our diverse communities to participate in reimagining our humanity.

Agnes Chavez is a new media artist , educator, and creative producer collaborating across disciplines to create data-visualized light and sound installations that seek balance between science and art, and nature and technology. Her most recent work, Fluidic Data , is a permanent installation which visualizes data from the Large Hadron Collider created in collaboration with scientists at the CERN Data Center in Geneva Switzerland. In 2009 she founded the STEMarts Lab , which designs immersive and educational sci-art experiences that empower youth and communities through art, science, and technology. She participated as an artist and as education director for the ISEA2012:Machine Wilderness symposium. In 2014, she co-founded The PASEO Festival and served as co-director/youth program director until 2018.  She created the SUBE , Language through Art, Music & Games curriculum for teaching language to children, which is in its 25th year. She is now developing an international youth exchange program called BioSTEAM International , partnering with U.S embassies to connect classrooms across borders to collaborate on sci-art installations that inspire scientific, artistic and humanistic literacy.

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Essay Sample about Digital Art

Art is a form of creativity that has been around since the creation of the earth. It has many different mediums or forms, a lot of history, and millions of creators worldwide. But one of the things that we’ll talk about is a new medium, digital art. Digital art is a new medium that has become popular in the past two decades as the digital age has been ushered in. Some people think that it isn’t “real art”, but today I’ll show why digital art is real art.

Digital art has pros in many ways. For example, when drawing on paper, the paper gets worn and torn as mistakes get erased and fixed . With markers and permanent materials, they are unable to be erased. With digital art, it is possible to erase all mistakes, and even use the undo button, which’ll erase the last line that was drawn. Digital art makes it easier to share and keep personal drawings accessible. It also is much cleaner than traditional art, which might have faint lines of pencil or accidental lines from a pen. 

With any new medium, it takes years to refine digital art skills. Picking the right program to use, exploring it, and getting used to the mechanics, takes a lot of time. One of the most used arguments is that there isn’t technically an ‘original’ piece, as it can be printed out infinitely, copied, and shared. That is true, but one of the other points is that heart and soul isn’t present as it is in traditional art. This is not true, digital artists put hours and days into some pieces, which is self explanatory. Another example would be when digital artists' drawings get stolen, which oftentimes they fight for the person who stole it to take it down.

Digital art is not only just drawing, which is only a subsection of digital art. It is composed of music, video games, e-books, and movies. Music can be recorded by microphones, and put into an editing software, which is then posted to spotify or Youtube, that is one example of digital art in other forms. People who make the argument that digital art is not ‘real art’, will also listen to music that was produced with digital software, read e-books, or play video games. Technically, they wouldn’t actually be listening to ‘real’ music, reading ‘real’ books, or playing ‘real’ video games, because music, books, video games are forms of art.

In closing, digital art is real art. There are many digital and traditional artists out there. It shouldn’t matter what medium that is used, what should matter is the connection between creations. Art is an important way of connecting with people, and it shouldn’t be plagued with arguments and trivial debates. I rest my case.

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The Philosophy of Digital Art

The philosophy of digital art is the philosophical study of art that crucially relies on computer processing in its production or presentation. There are many kinds of digital art, including digital cinema and video, digital photography and painting, electronic music, literary works generated by so-called “chatbots”, NFT art, net art, and video games. For the full range of digital art kinds, the aim is to identify their essential features, ground their proper appreciation, and situate our understanding of them in relation to pre-existing debates in aesthetics. This first-order inquiry cannot proceed without acknowledgment of the enormous interdisciplinary and popular interest in digital media. Claims are frequently made about fundamental shifts in the way we classify, evaluate, and engage with art now that computers seem to be involved in every kind of cultural production. The so-called “digital condition” (Kittler 1999) is characterized by a loss of trust in the image, a new way of experiencing the world as indeterminate and fragmentary, and a breakdown of traditional boundaries between artist and audience, artwork and artistic process. If we are looking for evidence of the digital condition, we need to understand its conceptual structure. Here’s where the philosopher comes in.

Although technology-based art is viewed as the “final avant-garde of the twentieth-century” (Rush 2005), and digital art has been part of the mainstream art world since the late 1990s (Paul 2008), the philosophy of digital art is still an emerging subfield. Three seminal monographs, one on videogames (Tavinor 2009), one on digital cinema (Gaut 2010), and one on computer art (Lopes 2010), have been invaluable in laying the groundwork concerning philosophical questions about art and computer technology. Since these publications, further philosophical attention has been given to the digital arts, including the first published volume to focus on the aesthetics of videogames (see Robson & Tavinor, eds., 2018). It can be challenging for philosophers to keep up with the rapid rate at which digital technology develops. But a number of recent articles on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the arts show that philosophers are well aware of and ready to meet this challenge (Atencia-Linares and Artiga 2022; Millière 2022; Moruzzi 2022; Roberts and Krueger 2022). The body of philosophical work on AI art will no doubt continue to grow, as will bodies of work on virtual reality in art and Internet art. With this growth, we can expect to to learn a great deal more about the extent and character of the digital cultural revolution.

1.1 The Digital Art World

1.2 the analog-digital distinction, 1.3 digital art: production, 1.4 digital art: presentation, 2. digital images, 3. appreciating artworks in digital media, 4.1 defining interactive works, 4.2 display variability, 4.3 interactivity and creativity, 5. locative art, other internet resources, related entries, 1. what is digital art.

In its broadest extant sense, “digital art” refers to art that relies on computer-based digital encoding, or on the electronic storage and processing of information in different formats—text, numbers, images, sounds—in a common binary code. The ways in which art-making can incorporate computer-based digital encoding are extremely diverse. A digital photograph may be the product of a manipulated sample of visual information captured with a digital camera from a “live” scene or captured with a scanner from a traditional celluloid photograph. Music can be recorded and then manipulated digitally or created digitally with specialized computer software. And a film is now the product of an extremely complex sequence of choices between analog and digital processes at the stages of image and sound capture or composition, image and sound editing, color correction or sound mastering, special effects production, and display or projection.

The complexity of the digital cinema workflow draws attention to a further difference concerning whether reliance on the digital is restricted to the way an artwork is made or extends to the display of the work. A work may be made on a computer—say, a musical work composed with Sibelius or a play written in Microsoft Word—and yet meant for apprehension in a non-digital format—say, performance on traditional musical instruments or enactment on stage. Similarly, a film could be captured and edited digitally before being printed on traditional 35mm photochemical film for projection in theaters. By contrast, works that are purely digital include a film made and projected digitally—for example, Dune (2021), a piece of music composed and played back electronically—for example, the electroacoustic works of Gottfried Michael Koenig (see Other Internet Resources ), and a work of ASCII art—an image made up from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII standard of 1963 and displayed on a computer monitor.

An example of ASCII art:

More recent kinds of purely digital art include Instagram art and Chatbot fiction. An example of the former is Land of Arca (2023), which is made up of narrative images created by AI and then curated by the Instagram account’s owner, IRK. An example of the latter is any of the myriad science fiction short stories with which several literary magazines were recently deluged.

Each of the examples above incorporates a computational process, to some degree, in the presentation of the work. In many ways, works belonging to digital media stand in stark contrast to those made by completely analog means.

The classical account of the analog-digital distinction is found in Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art (1976). In fact Goodman’s account remains practically the only general account of the distinction. While David Lewis (1971) raises a series of objections to Goodman, Lewis’ alternative account applies only to the representation of numbers. And while John Haugeland (1981) returns to the general distinction, he effectively qualifies and re-frames Goodman’s account in order to overcome Lewis’s and other potential objections. A few philosophers interested in clarifying the concepts employed by cognitive scientists have recognized the need for a general account of the analog-digital distinction (e.g., Dretske 1981; Blachowicz 1997; Katz 2008; Maley 2011). But in this context, as well, Goodman’s account is the essential point of reference. In some ways, this is surprising or at least striking: As Haugeland points out, the digital is a “mundane engineering notion” (1981: 217). Yet the philosophical context in which the notion receives its fullest analysis is that of aesthetics. As is well-known, Goodman’s interests in this context center on the role of musical notation in fixing the identity of musical works. But a musical notation is also a standard example of a digital system.

On Goodman’s broad, structuralist way of thinking, representational systems in general consist of sets of possible physical objects that count as token representations. Objects are grouped under syntactic and semantic types, and interesting differences between kinds of representational system track differences in the way syntactic and semantic types relate to one another. Digital systems are distinguished by being differentiated as opposed to dense . The condition of syntactic differentiation is met when the differences between classes of token representations are limited such that it is possible for users of the system always to tell that a token belongs to at most one class. The condition of semantic differentiation is met when the extension of each type, or the class of referents corresponding to a class of token representations, differs in limited ways from the extension of any other type; so that users of the system can always tell that a referent belongs to at most one extension. Goodman provides the following example of a simple digital computer, a system that meets the conditions of both syntactic and semantic differentiation: Say we have an instrument reporting on the number of dimes dropped into a toy bank with a capacity for holding 50 dimes, where the count is reported by an Arabic numeral on a small display (Goodman 1976: 159). In this system, the syntactic types are just the numbers 0–50, which have as their instances the discrete displays, at different times, of the corresponding Arabic numerals. Both the conditions of syntactic and semantic differentiation are met because the relevant differences between instances of different numbers are both highly circumscribed and conspicuous. This means that users of the system can be expected to be able to read the display, or determine which number is instantiated on the display (syntactic differentiation) and which numerical value, or how many coins, is thereby being indicated (semantic differentiation).

Analog representation fails to be differentiated because it is dense. With an ordering of types such that between any two types, there is a third, it is impossible to determine instantiation of at most one type. Not every case involving a failure of finite differentiation is a case of density but, in practice, most are. With a traditional thermometer, for example, heights of mercury that differ to any degree count as distinct syntactic types and the kinds of things that can differ semantically. Similarly, for pictures distinguished according to regions of color, for any two pictures, no matter how closely similar, one can always find a third more similar to each of them than they are to each other. Density is a feature of any system that measures continuously varying values. That is, as long as the system in question is designed so that any difference in magnitude indicates a difference in type.

Returning to the digital, some commentators have questioned whether Goodman’s condition of (syntactic and semantic) finite differentiation is sufficient to distinguish the kind of representation in question (Haugeland 1981; Lewis 1971). John Haugeland, for example, argues that there can be differentiated schemes without the “copyability” feature that defines the practical significance of digital systems. Haugeland’s solution is to require the practical and not just the theoretical possibility of a system’s users determining type membership. In fact, however, Goodman himself would likely accept this modification. In a later work, Goodman explicitly states that finite differentiation must make it possible to determine type membership “by means available and appropriate to the given user of the given scheme” (Goodman and Elgin 1988: 125).

Whether or not a work of digital art is a work of representational art, and even with the most abstract works of digital art, there are layers of representation involved in the complex processes of their production and presentation. Most of these layers, and arguably the most important ones, are digital. Where there are analog systems involved, digital translation makes possible the realization of the values of the final work. This is perhaps best seen with paradigmatic cases of digital art. Consider the following two relatively early works:

• Craig Kalpakjian, Corridor , 1995. Computer-generated animation on laser video disc, in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The video leads us slowly down an empty office hallway that is slightly curved and evenly lit, with pale, blank walls and opaque glass windows.
• Cory Arcangel and Paul B. Davis, Landscape Study #4 , 2002. Installation. A “reverse-engineered” video game that aims to transpose our everyday surroundings onto a video game platform. The work “plays” on a Nintendo gaming system and displays a continuously scrolling landscape with the blocky, minimalist graphics of the Mario Bros. game.

The first of these works involves digital moving imagery that is entirely generated by a computer program. At the same time, the video looks like it was or could have been recorded in an actual office setting. The particular significance of the work depends on the viewer being aware of its digital composition while at the same time being struck by its photorealistic familiarity. According to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF MoMA),

Kalpakjian thus reveals the complete artificiality of the built environments we inhabit, and their aesthetic distance from more humanistic forms. (SF MoMA n.d.)

The second work involves imagery that was initially captured digitally. Arcangel & Davis began by taking 360-degree photographs of Buffalo, New York. They scanned and modified the photographs on their computer so that the images could be coded according to the graphics capabilities of the Nintendo gaming system, and in order to give the images the distinctive look and feel of the Mario Bros. game. Arcangel & Davis then programmed the landscape imagery to scroll continuously across a TV screen, as in the Mario Bros. game. Finally, Arcangel & Davis melted the chips in a Super Mario cartridge, replacing them with their self-manufactured chips so that their landscape “game” could be run on any Nintendo system. As well as all the ways in which Arcangel & Davis’s work relies on both the technology and aesthetics of videogames, there are clearly ways in which it deliberately removes or blocks certain key features or capacities of videogames, perhaps most notably their robust interactivity. Playing a videogame essentially involves the prescribed creation of new display instances of a work. But we do not “play” Landscape Study #4 , and its imagery is fixed by the artist. The kind of interactivity typical of videogames can also be found in artworks made without computers (see Lopes 2010: 49). But this type of interactivity is most closely associated with digital art because complex interactivity is so much easier to achieve with the use of computers. This suggests a high degree of self-consciousness in Arcangel & Davis’s decision to block the interactivity of their reverse-engineered videogame. From the perspective of the philosophy of digital art, such a decision highlights the need for further discussion of the link between the nature of the digital and the nature of interactivity.

What is it about the ways in which the works by Arcangel & Davis, and by Kalpakjian, are produced that makes them digital in an appreciatively relevant sense? Computer imaging depends on the inherent programmability and automation of digital computers. Digital image capture depends on sampling and subsequently on the near-instantaneous processes of discrete coding. None of this would be possible without a series of linked systems each with finitely differentiated settings.

At the most basic level, the myriad transistors in a computer are essentially tiny digital schemes, each with two types: the “on” and “off” settings of the transistor-capacitor switch. The settings are discrete and distinguishable, as are their compliance classes, of 1s and 0s. The ubiquity of binary code in computer processing is a consequence of the fact that a digital computer is essentially a vast collection of on-off switches. A particular sequence of 1s and 0s realized at a particular time in virtue of the requisite arrangement of transistors is a binary instance of a particular number, interchangeable with all other instances of the same number and not interchangeable with any instances of different numbers. The difference between instances of one number and instances of other numbers is strictly limited to the difference in the ordering of 1s and 0s. In other words, Goodman’s condition of finite differentiation is clearly met. In turn, the numbers can refer to other values, including the light-intensity values of an image. A computation simply involves the generation of output strings of binary digits from input strings, in accordance with a general rule that depends on the properties of the strings (Piccinini 2008). The modern (digital) computer encodes both input data and assembly languages as sequences of binary digits, or bits, and allows for the internal storage of instructions. This makes the computer essentially programmable in the sense that it can be modified to compute new functions simply by being fed an appropriate arrangement of bits.

A program is a list of instructions, and instructions are strings of digits. The modern digital computer has components that serve to copy and store programs inside the machine, and to supply instructions to the computer’s processing units for implementation in the appropriate order. The outputs of a system can be dependent on specific inputs often in tandem with the conditional if-then statements. This is what is involved in a computer executing conditional branching instructions such that it can monitor and respond to its own intermediate computational states and even modify instructions based on its own processes. Such modifications are dictated by an algorithm—the program’s set of rules and operations. It is the digital computer’s capacity for branching, due to its digital programmability, that allows for the kinds of higher-level automation involved in the use of imaging applications and sequential image-generation. Our artists, Kalpakjian, and Arcangel & Davis, do not have to enter the strings of digits for every basic operation of the computer that underlies the complex operations involved in describing and manipulating images. If they did have to do this, they would never finish making their artworks. Rather, artists can rely on open-source code, libraries, or commercial software that automatically and instantaneously supplies the lines of code required for the execution of their artistic decisions.

The imaging software with which Kalpakjian works allows him to generate architectural interiors in rich detail. Arcangel & Davis do not require as much from their imaging software given that they are manipulating previously captured and scanned images. The process of scanning the photographs, just like the process involved in digital photography, involves sampling and quantization of a visual source; assigning an integer, from a finite range, to the average light-intensity measured across each small area of source-space corresponding to a cell in a grid. This process involves averaging and rounding up values, and it involves measurement, or sampling, of light intensities at (spatially and temporally) discrete intervals. Some, indeed many, of the differences in light intensity across the source image or scene (and at different times, in the case of moving imagery) are thereby dropped by the process of digital image-capture. Among some media theorists, this fact has led to deep suspicion of the digitally recorded image, prompting the feeling that the digital image is always a poor substitute for the analog. Current digital technologies for image-capture and display have such high rates of sampling frequency and resolution that the values dropped in quantization are well below the threshold of human perception. At the same time, Arcangel & Davis’s Landscape Study #4 reminds us that digital artists may choose to exploit visible pixellation for particular artistic ends.

A digitally recorded image need not appear any less richly detailed or varied in color than an analog image. All the same, in the terms of D. N. Rodowick, whereas the analog photograph is an “isomorphic transcription” of its subject, a digital photograph is a “data-output”, with a symbolically-mediated link to its subject (Rodowick 2007: 117–8). This ontological divide—described by William J. Mitchell as a “sudden and decisive rupture” in the history of photography (1994: 59), is then assumed to have aesthetic implications: Rodowick insists that the “discontinuities” in digital information “produce perceptual or aesthetic effects”. Despite this insistence, however, Rodowick goes on to acknowledge that, with enough resolution, “a digital photograph can simulate the look of a continuously produced analogical image”. This concession would seem to work against any attempt to identify the aesthetic effects of pixellation, even if “the pixel grid remains in the logical structure of the image” (Rodowick 2007: 119). But if we are to interpret Rodowick charitably, he could be implying that ontology at least partly determines appropriate appreciation; even if a digital photograph can look just like an analog photograph, its (known) digital status affects which of its perceptible features are aesthetically relevant and how we appropriately engage with them.

The media theorists’ worry about the impoverished digital image primarily refers to the production of digital images with its reliance on sampling and quantization. But there are also analogous worries about the digital presentation of images, worries about deep structural changes to analog images once they are displayed digitally—for example, on a liquid crystal display (LCD) screen or when projected digitally on a flat surface. Of course one could simply be interested in investigating these structural changes without being particularly worried about them. This shall be our approach.

The traditional method of film reel projection has been a remarkably stable and entrenched technology, remaining largely unchanged for over a century. But digital projection has almost taken over, particularly in conjunction with the networked distribution of films. Although films’ audiences may not be able to see the difference on screen between analog and digital projection, their expectations are changing—for example, about what can go wrong in the presentation of a film. A deeper assumption that has not changed, one that is almost universal among film scholars, is that films fundamentally depend on an illusion. Cinema is the art of moving images and thus its very existence depends on our being tricked into seeing a rapid succession of static images as a persistent moving image. In the philosophy of film, there is a small debate about the status of cinematic motion—whether it really is an illusion as commonly assumed. An analysis of digital projection technology reveals new complexities in this debate but ultimately provides additional reasons to stick with the popular illusionist view.

Traditional and digital projection methods could not seem more different: the former involves running a flexible film strip through a mechanical projector; the latter involves a complex array of micromirrors on semiconductor chips, which, in combination with a prism and a lamp, generate projectable images from binary code. Nevertheless, both are methods for generating the impression of a continuously illuminated, persistent moving image from a sequence of static images. Compared with traditional projection, however, digital projection includes an extra step, whereby the images in the static sequence are generated from flashes of light. In order to generate each image in the digital projector, a light beam from a high-powered lamp is separated by a prism into its color components of red, blue, and green. Each color beam then hits a different Digital Micromirror Device (DMD), which is a semiconductor chip covered with more than a million tiny, hinged mirrors. Based on the information encoded in the video signal, the DMDs selectively turn over some of the tiny mirrors to reflect the colored lights. Most of the tiny mirrors are flipped thousands of times a second in order to create the gradations of light and dark making up a monochromatic, pixellated image—a mirror that is flipped on a greater proportion of the time will reflect more light and so will form a brighter pixel than a mirror that is not flipped on for so long. Each DMD reflects a monochromatic image back to the prism, which then recombines the colors to form the projected, full-color image. This image—if it were held for long enough on the screen—would be perceived as static. In order then to produce the impression of motion in the projected, full-color image, the underlying memory array of the DMDs has to update rapidly so that all the micromirrors are released simultaneously and allowed to move into a new “address state”, providing new patterns of light modulation for successive images.

The two-stage process of digital projection, by which the moving image is created from a succession of static images that are themselves created by motion, draws attention to the metaphysical complexity of the question of how movies move. In particular, one is unlikely to determine the status of the impression of motion that makes possible the art of cinema unless one can determine the status of the imagery that is seen to move. Given that motion involves an object occupying contiguous spatial locations in successive moments of time, a moving object must be re-identifiable over time. A moving image in a film, arising as it does out of the rapid display of a succession of still images, is not obviously a persistent object that can be seen to move. Then again, perhaps it is enough that ordinary viewers identify an image—say of a moving train— as the same image, for the moving image to persist (Currie 1996). Alternatively, the moving image could be thought to persist as a second-order physical entity constituted by a sequence of flashing lights (Ponech 2006).

The second proposal immediately runs into trouble with digital projection. If the traditionally projected moving image exists as a series of flashes of light, in digital projection, other “intermediate” objects must be granted existence—for example, the stable point of light consisting of the rate of flashes, and gaps between them, of a single micromirror on the DMD. At the same time, the moving image itself must be stripped of its existence since it does not consist of flashes of light. This is due to the fact that, in digital projection, there are no gaps between frames and so no underlying, imperceptible alternation of light and dark. This leaves the realist in the awkward position of claiming that the moving image goes in and out of existence with the switch between analog and digital projection technologies.

The first proposal, on which cinematic motion is a secondary quality, threatens to destroy the distinction between the apparent and the illusory. It suggests a way of reinterpreting any case of perceptual illusion as a case involving the ascription of secondary qualities. That is, unless it can be shown that there are independent means of checking that we are mistaken about genuine illusions. But even if this can be shown, a problem remains: While there may not be an independent check for the motion of an image, there is likewise no independent check for a genuine illusion of color. Given the contrived conditions of film viewing, there is more reason to think of cinematic motion as akin to an illusory, than to a genuine, experience of color. With the introduction of digital projection, the conditions are arguably even more contrived. For it is not just movement in the image but the image itself that is constituted by rapid flashes of light. And the technology involved is far less accessible than that of a traditional mechanical projector in the sense that one cannot, just by looking at the projection device, see (roughly) how it works. In this way, an analysis of digital movie projection serves to reinforce the traditional assumption that cinema is an art of illusion. In addition, however, the analysis suggests that the illusion at the heart of cinema is particularly impenetrable—akin to an illusion of color, and thus an illusion of a mere appearance that cannot be checked (Thomson-Jones 2013).

With digital movie projection, we begin to see the importance of understanding the technology of display for understanding the nature of digital art. Another way we see its importance is in relation to images displayed on LCD screens. According to Goodman, images are essentially analog. Nevertheless, there seems to be a way for engineers to circumvent the essential analogicity of pictorial schemes by using digital technologies for encoded subphenomenal discrimination. Arguably, finite differentiation can be imposed on the scheme of all possible images displayed on high-resolution LCD screens. As we shall see, this has far-reaching implications for the ways in which we think about and properly appreciate image-based art.

Both in his earlier and in his later work in aesthetics, Goodman commits to “a special relation” between the analog and the pictorial, one that is seen when we compare “the presystematic notions of description and picture in a given culture”. Given two schemes, S and S′ , where S consists of all descriptions or predicates in a language such as English, and S′ consists of all pictures, if we were told only of the structures of S and S′ , we could distinguish the pictorial scheme by its being analog (Goodman and Elgin 1988: 130). The special relation remains, Goodman claims, despite the possibility of a digital sub-scheme made up of black and white grid patterns all of which happen to be pictures. In such a scheme, the differences between patterned types that matter for the scheme’s being digital do not include all of the differences that matter for distinguishing pictorial types. Pictures are distinguished by color, shape, and size, which vary continuously; any variation in color, shape, or size potentially results in a different picture. When we impose limits on the differences that matter for distinguishing one grid pattern in the scheme from another, we are not interpreting the grid patterns as pictures; if we were to do so, we would have to treat them as members of a syntactically dense, or analog, scheme.

Goodman’s insight about grid patterns and pictures suggests an immediate difficulty for explaining the digital status of images displayed on LCD screens: Clearly it will not be sufficient to point out that such images are pixellated, and therefore made up of small identical building blocks that impose a lower limit on the differences between display-instances. Remember that pictures are defined by color, shape, and size, which vary continuously. This means there is going to be vagueness at the limits of types – even though the physical pixels of an LCD screen are such that there are gaps between the possible shapes, sizes, and colors that the screen can instantiate; and, there are a finite number of shapes, sizes, and colors that the screen can instantiate. Any means of discretely carving up the property spaces of color, shape, and size has to involve grouping into types what are in fact (subphenomenally) distinct shapes, sizes, and colors, some of which may differ less from adjacent properties grouped into other types. This makes it impossible always to determine unique class membership; hence, finite differentiation fails.

Pixellation alone, no matter the resolution, cannot account for images displayed on LCD screens belonging to a digital scheme; digital images qua images thus remain stubbornly analog. But perhaps a closer analysis of digital imaging technology can show that finite differentiation is met after all. Current technologies for sampling and instantiating light intensities group objective colors well below the level of phenomenal discrimination. For example, in the standard “Truecolor” system, a display pixel has three 8-bit subpixels, each of which emits a different visible wavelength with an intensity from a range of 256 values, yielding over 16 million objective colors. Such a large number of available colors gives the impression of a color continuum when, in fact, digital sampling technology has been used to carve up the objective color space into a disjoint series of wavelength intensities. On the one hand, from the fact that display pixels can be lit at intensities between and indiscriminable from adjacent discriminable intensities, it seems to follow that finite differentiation fails. On the other hand, precisely because digital technology involves microtechnology and metrology for subphenomenal discrimination between colors, the light intensity groupings that are expressed numerically as red-blue-green triplets (in, say, the Truecolor system) can be narrower than the objective color types that contribute to the resultant image scheme. The key is keeping the variations in the essentially analog properties of color, shape, and size small enough so that they cannot accumulate to the point of making a difference to image perception (Zeimbekis 2012). The types in the scheme of digital images are technologically segmented, transitive groupings of the same color-, shape-, and size-experiences. The carving out of a transitive sub-set of magnitudes has to occur relative to the needs of the users of the system. In the case of digital color, the types are classes of light intensities sufficient to cause the same color experience for normal human perceivers. The replicability of digital images is made possible by the gap between the discriminatory limits of the human visual system and the discriminatory limits of digital sampling technology.

Digital images can be replicated insofar as they are digital and thus finitely differentiated. They are finitely differentiated because they rely on subphenomenal sampling and display technology. In practical terms, replication depends on the use of binary code, even though this is not in fact what makes images qua images digital. Of course binary code representations are themselves part of a digital scheme. But the role of binary code in image-instantiation is just one of consistent preservation; preservation for long enough to permit reproduction. Despite the inherent replicability of digital images, it does not appear to follow automatically that artworks involving these images are multiples.

The SF MoMA is in possession of the original of Kalpakjian’s work, Corridor ; they control access to the video imagery. At present, the work is not available to be viewed: it cannot be viewed on-line as part of a digital archive or collection, nor is it currently on view in the physical space of the museum. The image sequence comprising the work could be multiply instantiated and widely distributed, but in fact it is not, nor is it meant to be. Similarly with Arcangel & Davis’s work, Landscape Study #4 : This work is described as an installation, meant to be exhibited in a physical gallery alongside an arrangement of printed stills, with a television connected to a Nintendo Entertainment System. Again, the image sequence displayed on the television could be multiply instantiated and widely distributed, but it is not, nor is it meant to be. Clips and copies of the landscape imagery are available on-line, but these do not instantiate parts of the work itself. By contrast, works of net art are instantiated whenever they are accessed by someone on-line.

There are many kinds of net art, including various forms of experimental on-line literature, conceptual browser art, and works drawing on software and computer gaming conventions. Extensive on-line collections of visual and audiovisual net art are rigorously curated and at the same time immediately accessible to ordinary Internet users. When it comes to the conventions of access and presentation, the contrast is striking between works of net art and works like those by Kalpakjian, and Arcangel & Davis. Perhaps a digital artwork comprising multiply instantiable images need not itself be multiply instantiable. At this point, the philosophy of digital art joins an ongoing debate about the ontology of art.

On the question of whether artworks are all the same kind of thing or many different kinds of things, ontological pluralism is often taken to be implied by the primary role of the artist in “sanctioning” features of their work (Irvin 2005, 2008; Thomasson 2010). A sanction can consist simply in, say, the painting of a canvas by a self-professed artist and the subsequent display of the work in a gallery. The artist has sanctioned those features of the work that make it a traditional painting. But what was once largely implicit is now often explicit: many contemporary works of art are defined by a set of instructions for their presentation (e.g., aspect ratio, resolution). We can find plenty of examples of non-digital works that are defined by a set of instructions, such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991). This work is given to a gallery to display by way of nothing more than a set of instructions for constructing and maintaining a pile of candies. Whether non-digital or digital, the instructions determine what is part of the work and what is not, and whether the work is singular or multiply instantiable. As a result, the instructions guide appropriate interpretation of the work. On this view, ontology precedes interpretation: we cannot properly and fully appreciate a work, for the work that it is, without a prior determination of what it comprises. This is a matter of contention, however. On another way of thinking, artworks just are objects of interpretation, and there is no artwork whose boundaries can be identified before we begin interpretation (Davies 2004).

The issue of the relation between ontology and interpretation is a complex and difficult one, but progress can be made on the issue through an examination of digital art practices. This is particularly in light of the high degree of self-consciousness with which many digital artists and digital art curators specify the features of digital art works. It is a common practice, for example, when archiving net art, to have artists fill out a questionnaire in order to specify which features of a work are crucial for its preservation—whether features of appearance, timing and motion, interactivity potentials and methods, linking to other sites, or hardware and software. When a work of net art is individuated by its imagery, say, the artist has chosen to make the inherent replicability of digital imagery part of the work. That this is a choice is suggested by the existence of singular works of digital visual art, like the examples discussed above. The question of whether the works by Kalpakjian, and Arcangel & Davis can function allographically requires further investigation (see D’Cruz and Magnus 2014). But if they can so function, the artist’s presentation instructions have a primary role to play in fixing, not just the art form (installation, movie, conceptual work, etc.) but the basic structure of the work – for example, in determining whether the work is singular and thus identical with a certain kind of physical display or multiple with no original display. Where interactive digital works are concerned, individuation is determined by a set of algorithms. An algorithmic account of interactive digital art suggests that, although the code is important for adequate instantiation of the work, it is the algorithm that specifies the crucial features of the work (Lopes 2010; Tavinor 2011; Moser 2018). Since the code is, ontologically speaking, less relevant than the algorithm, this account makes allowances for the variability that may be found in the code when an instance of a program is run on different kinds of devices.

Reflection on the kinds and significance of choices available to an artist contributes to a full appreciation of the artist’s work. For any artwork, appreciation begins with recognition of its status as a work , the product of artistic activity of some kind, and thus something to be appreciated as the achievement of an artist or group of artists. Most commonly, this achievement is understood in terms of the aesthetically significant effects achieved by an artist with certain kinds of tools and materials and in light of certain appreciative conventions. In other words, the achievement is always relative to an artistic medium. Returning to the case of an artist choosing what to do about the inherent replicability of digital imagery, another way of thinking about this choice is in terms of the artist recognizing the limits and capacities of their chosen medium. Images conveyed digitally are always replicable and so when an artist aims to convey artistic content through digital imagery, they either have to accept the inevitable multiplicity of their works or resist the tendency of the medium and somehow specify the work’s singularity in presentation. At a more fine-grained level, our appreciation of particular effects—of color and composition, expression, narrative structure, and so on—depends on the effects themselves but also on background acknowledgment of their degree of difficulty or innovation in the relevant medium. The production of digital art relies on the computer automation of many of the tasks, both manual and cognitive, traditionally involved in making art. The effects achieved by computer automation cannot be assessed in the same way as those achieved by traditional “hands-on” artistic methods. The terms of our appreciation, therefore, need to be adjusted in the digital age. This is certainly compatible with the continued relevance of medium-based appreciation, as long as we can make sense of digital media as artistic media (Binkley 1998). But there is a strong tendency in film and media studies to assume that the medium has absolutely no role to play in the appreciation of digital art.

Summing up this view, it supposedly follows from the fact that modern (digital) computers encode every kind of information in the same way—i.e., as a sequence of binary digits—that a digital artwork is no longer defined by its mode of presentation, whether in images, moving images, sound patterns, or text. A work’s display is rendered merely contingent by the fact that it is generated from a common code. By adding a particular instruction to the code sequence specifying a work, imagery associated with that work could be instantaneously converted into sounds or text, or just into different imagery. This possibility alone supposedly renders meaningless all talk of an artwork being in a particular medium and being properly appreciated in terms of that medium (Kittler 1999; Doane 2007).

Given the considerable effects of digital technology on artistic production, it is perhaps understandable that some commentators are inclined toward a radical overhauling of art theoretical concepts. But their arguments in support of such an overhaul are, at best, incomplete. We see this once we cite some important continuities between ways of making and thinking about art in the analog age and in the digital age. It has always been the case, for example, that “any medium can be translated into any other” (Kittler 1999: 1): Without using a computer, someone could manually devise a set of rules (an algorithm) for the translation of image values, say, into sounds or text. Moreover, a common storage and transmission means for (moving) imagery and sound is not unique to digital technology: As Doron Galili points out (2011), electronic image transmission going back to the late nineteenth century—in other words, precursors of the TV—relies on the conversion of both images and sound into electronic pulses.

Apart from these important continuities, the media theorist’s inference from translatability to medium-free art simply does not hold. That we could set about “translating” the imagery of Seven Samurai into a symphony does not mean that the original artwork lacks a medium; it is a film, after all, and as such, it has to be in the medium of moving images. The symphonic translation of Seven Samurai is not the same work as the 1954 film by Akira Kurosawa. This reminds us that, in deciding whether there is a digital medium, we must not reduce the medium to the artist’s materials, for it also matters how the artist uses those materials. Nor must we limit the constitutive materials of a medium to physical materials. The case of literature shows that neither the materials of an art form, nor their modes of manipulation, need be physical. The medium of literature is neither paper and ink nor abstract lexical symbols, but letters and words used in certain ways. There are, of course, many different ways of physically storing and transmitting literary works, including by the printed page, in audio recordings, and by memory (human or computer). But from the fact that David Copperfield can be preserved in many different formats, it does not follow that this novel is any less decisively a novel and, as such, in the medium of literature.

Just as with a literary work, the preservation and transmission of digital works in different formats depends on the use of a common code, but a binary numeric code rather than a lexical one. As we have seen, words and their literary uses constitute the medium of literature. In the same way, binary code, along with the information it implements, and its artistic uses constitute the medium of digital art. This allows for the possibility that the digital medium contains various sub-media, or “nested” media (Gaut 2010). For instance, within the medium of digital art, the medium of digital visual art comprises artistic uses of computer code specifically to create images. In technical terms, such uses can be referred to as (artistic) “bitmapping”, given that a computer ultimately stores all images (2D and 3D vector) as bitmaps, which are code sequences specifying the integers assigned to light intensity measurements in a pixel grid. The medium of bitmapping is thus distinguished by a kind of digital technology, but the kind used to produce just those items belonging to the traditional medium of images.

Once the notion of digital media is revealed to be no more confused or mysterious than the familiar notion of literary media, its irreducible role in appreciation becomes apparent. To take just one example, proper appreciation of films in the digital age depends on recognizing that digital filmmaking tools do not just make traditional filmmaking easier; they also present new creative possibilities and challenges. Given the maturity and mass-art status of the cinematic art form, it is easy to take for granted the medium of moving imagery; we may think we know exactly what its limits are, and we may even think we have seen everything that can be done with it. The digital medium is different, however, and digital cinema is in both the medium of moving imagery and the digital medium.

At first glance, it might seem odd to speak of “challenges” or “limits” in relation to digital processes, which allow for instantaneous and endless modification with increasingly user-friendly applications and devices. The high degree of automation in the process of capturing an image with a digital video camera, along with increasingly high image resolution and memory capacity, could make it seem as though digital images are too easily achieved to be interesting. Then there are the practically endless possibilities for “correcting” the captured image with applications like Photoshop. When we take a photo or video on our smartphones, an AI program automatically optimizes focus, contrast, and detail. Digital sound recording is likewise increasingly automated, increasingly fine-grained, and reliant on ever-larger computer memory capacities. Modifying and mastering recorded sound with digital editing software allows for an unlimited testing of options. In digital film editing, sequence changes are instantaneous and entirely reversible—quite unlike when the editing process involved the physical cutting and splicing of a film (image or sound) strip. Digital tools thus allow filmmakers to focus (almost) purely on the look and sound of the movie without having to worry about the technical difficulty or finality of implementation.

Rather than dismissing all digital works as too easily achieved to be interesting, medium-based appreciation requires that we consider the digital on its own terms. This means we must allow for the possibility that certain kinds of increased technical efficiency can bring new creative risks. For example, even though committing to certain editorial decisions does not entail irreversible alterations to a filmstrip, arriving at those decisions involves sifting through and eliminating far more options, a process which can easily become overwhelming and therefore more error-ridden. When we properly appreciate a digital film, part of what we need to appreciate is the significance of any scene or sequence looking just the way it does when it could have, so easily, looked many other ways. Similarly, when we properly appreciate an interactive digital installation or videogame, we are, in part, appreciating certain representations, functions, and capabilities of the input-output system, made possible by digital media. This is undeniably a form of medium-based appreciation and the medium to which we appeal is digital. It is only when we think of a digital film as in a digital medium that we can appreciate it as a particular response to the creative problem, introduced by coding, of finalizing selections from a vast array of equally and instantly available options.

The case of digital cinema is perhaps a useful starting point for work in the philosophy of digital art. Digital cinema is a multi-media art form, after all, involving 2D and 3D moving images as well as sound. It also has the potential for robust interactivity, whereby audiences select story events or otherwise modify a film screening in prescribed ways (Gaut 2010: 224–43). Many of the digital tools developed by the film and video game industries are now available more widely to artists interested in making other forms of digital art, including net art, digital sound installations, and virtual reality art (Grau 2003; Chalmers 2017; Tavinor 2019). In terms of how the use of these tools affects proper appreciation, there are important continuities between the filmmaking context and the wider digital art world. In addition, the philosophy of film is a well-established subfield in aesthetics, one that engages with both film theory and cognitive science in order to explicate the nature of film as a mass art (Thomson-Jones 2014, Other Internet Resources). For many of the standard topics in the philosophy of film, interesting and important questions arise when we extend the discussion from analog to digital cinema. There is a question, for example, about the kinds and significance of realism that can be achieved with traditional celluloid film as compared with manipulated digital imagery (Gaut 2010: 60–97). The philosophy of film can provide some of the initial terms of analysis for artworks in a broad range of digital media. At the same time, it is important to approach each of the digital arts on their own terms under the assumption that the digital is an artistically significant category.

4. Interactivity

More and more, contemporary artists are taking advantage of the dynamic and responsive capabilities of digital media to make art interactive. The experimental online literature, conceptual browser art, and videogames mentioned above all require user interactivity, but they do so to varying degrees. Therefore, if interactivity plays a distinctive role in the digital arts, there are good reasons to analyse the nature of these works more deeply.

Not all digital works are interactive, and not all interactive works are digital. However, since computers are inherently interactive, much of the early philosophical literature on interactivity arose from the emergence of computer art (also see Smuts 2009; Lopes 2001; Saltz 1997). The distinctive character of interactive digital art is best considered in tandem with the work’s ontology.

Before analyzing interactivity any further, first, consider the following description of the digital installation “Universe of Water Particles on a Rock where People Gather” (henceforth, “Rock where People Gather”) by TeamLab:

“Rock where People Gather” is reproduced in a virtual three-dimensional space. Water is simulated to fall onto the rock, and the flow of the water draws the shape of the waterfall. The water is represented by a continuum of numerous water particles and the interaction between the particles is then calculated. Lines are drawn in relation to the behavior of the water particles. The lines are then “flattened” using what TeamLab considers to be “ultrasubjective” space. When a person stands on the rock or touches the waterfall, they too become like a rock that changes the flow of water. The flow of water continues to transform in real time due to the interaction of people. Previous visual states can never be replicated, and will never reoccur (TeamLab 2018).

“Rock where People Gather” illustrates that interactive works permit us to appreciate both the work and the properties brought about by the interactions. To define these characteristics of interactive art, Dominic Lopes states, “A work of art is interactive just in case it prescribes that the actions of its users help generate its display” (Lopes 2010:36, original emphasis). The display is anything that is instanced in a work, or the perceptual properties that come about via interactivity. Users help generate these features making interactive works distinctive. However, at this point, one could imagine reading the chapters of, let us say, a digitized copy of The Brothers Karamazov in random order, thereby changing what properties get instanced from the original work. Does this example qualify as interactive art in the Lopesian sense? Although some stories, such as choose-your-own-adventure books, allow readers to shuffle the narrative arc, most traditional stories do not; if the randomized Karamazov example is interactive, it is only so in the weakest sense of the term because users are not prescribed to change the properties as described. Another way to think about these differences returns us to a work’s structure. Readers who decide to roguishly randomize a story merely change how they access a work’s structure simply because the medium does not prohibit it, whereas readers of choose-your-own-adventure books and other interactive works can change the work’s structure in a prescribed manner (Lopes 2001:68).

That users are responsible for generating certain features of an interactive work means that their displays, unlike those of non-interactive works, can occur in a couple of different ways (Lopes 2010: 37-38). The less standard of the two occurs when the displays of an interactive work are generated in a succession of states over a period of time, but where none of the displays can be revisited. One such example is Telegarden , a temporary work of computer art that users accessed from a networked computer. The work was comprised of a table with an attached mechanical arm that dispensed water and food for the plants via the users’ inputs. As one may imagine, the garden took shape in a variety of ways over the span of its exhibition, but each state of the garden, or its succession of display states, could not be repeated. Although not common, videogames can also exhibit this kind of display variability. Consider the experimental game, Cube . For a limited time, players could explore a large cube and its nested smaller cubes while racing to be the first to reach the center. As with Telegarden , players generated different properties of the game displays by interacting with it, but once a new display was generated, the previous ones were gone.

The more standard of the two variable structures for interactive works are displays that can be repeated, such as most net art and videogames that can be accessed many times, from multiple locations, to generate different displays. Although repeatable works are more common (at least with videogames if not museum-housed works), more needs to be said about the changing properties of these works and how the repeatability trait distinguishes interactive digital works from non-interactive digital images.

If the display properties of digital images can vary from instance to instance due to even slightly different settings on different devices (e.g., brightness, resolution, intensity), then the aesthetic and structural differences of many works could be misconstrued as interactive. Since the example just given is not an interactive work of art, it is worth looking more closely at what is going on with non-interactive repeatable works versus interactive repeatable ones. Consider traditional performance works such as works of theater and music. Each performance might differ to a slight degree due to different performers and other varying conditions of the environment, and these may certainly affect our aesthetic experiences each time. However, those changes, in principle, do not reshape the structure of the performed play or song. In the same way, the subtle changes made with a digitally displayed image do not change the structure of the image-based work. Compare those slight artistic or aesthetic variations to the display variability of interactive works. For example, many videogames permit players to choose which route to take, quests to accept, characters to kill or save, personalities to adopt, and the like. These sorts of in-game player choices are not merely generating features such as varying the brightness or resolution, nor are they as straightforwardly interactive as a game of chess that ends in a win or a loss. Rather, the degree of variability permits multiple endings. Again for comparison, while traditional tragedies will always end on a tragic note, some highly variable works can end either on a tragic note or on one that is not at all tragic.

To articulate the above more clearly, Dominic Preston says,

for any given artwork, each possible set of structural and aesthetic properties F is a display type of that artwork. (Preston 2014: 271, original emphasis).

From the above, we can briefly infer the following scenarios: works like digital photographs are ontologically similar to plays and music because they consist of one prescribed display type. While the display type might permit multiple displays (duplicates, performances, instances, etc.) consisting of subtle variances between the particular tokens, there is still a single correct display that should be maintained or achieved. Works that instance a succession of states such as Telegarden and Cube consist of multiple potential display types where only one display type is instantiated at any given time. Now, compare such works with those like videogames that present us with the strong degrees of display variability mentioned earlier. Because some repeatable works can end drastically differently from one “playthrough” to the next, there is no singular, correct display. Instead, these sorts of works consist of both multiple display types and multiple displays, which means users will generate one of the possible display types (and their displays) each time they repeat the work.

According to Katherine Thomson-Jones (2021), there is a problem with Preston’s claim that interactive artworks — at least ones that are digital — have multiple display types, as well as multiple displays. This is because the digital is inherently replicable and replicability requires a transmissible display — a single display type that can have multiple, interchangeable instances. This seems to introduce a problem of incompatibility: How can we have an image whose instances still count as instances of the same image-based work when those instances, in virtue of users’ actions, look very different from one another? There are various ways one might overcome this problem — for example, by distinguishing between the display of an image and the display of an artwork that incorporates the image in question. Preston’s distinction between display and display type can continue to play a role here. While the concept of interactivity with high variability is mostly applicable to videogames, one can imagine interactive digital installations, net art, and table-top roleplaying games to which it also applies.

It is important to reiterate that the strong interactivity just described is not restricted to the digital. Whilst interactivity is a standard feature of many contemporary digital works, and the responsiveness of such works is remarkable, non-digital appreciative categories can also exploit a similar degree of display variability. For example, literature, theater, and tabletop role-playing games can be strongly interactive in ways similar to many digital artworks. What is unique about all such works are the ways in which things like immersion, agency, identity, and fiction, to list a few features, are impacted by interactivity, due to the user’s role in the work (for more, see Robinson & Tavinor 2018; Patridge 2017; Meskin & Robson 2016).

A noteworthy point about the concepts presented above is that they are all conceived with the norms of traditional art and art practices in mind, meaning, works of art that are predominantly object-based. However, as described, interactive digital works can be said to have a “behavior” based on prescribed interactions. While traditional artworks typically emphasize a work that is complete prior to audience engagement, interactive works emphasize the moment-to-moment unfolding of the works by way of audience engagement. One recent approach to the ontology of art suggests that interactive works (among other kinds) are better conceived on a process-based, rather than on an object-based, model (Nguyen 2020). A key difference between the two models is that the former focuses on the user’s actions and experiences or “inward aesthetics”, while the latter focuses on the “outward” aesthetic features of the self-contained object (Nguyen 2020: 25). While a process-based account prioritizes the internalizability of a user’s actions, it does not completely give up the idea of an artistic object. Rather, it renders the object’s significance secondary insofar as any appreciation for a work’s objecthood is in service to the activities it permits (Nguyen 2020: 20).

Just as the case of digital art can enrich our understanding of interactivity, so it can enrich our understanding of artistic creativity and creative attribution. This is in part because the issues of interactivity and creativity are closely related. In making a work that is strongly interactive, an artist cedes to the user a certain amount of control in determining the look, sound, or structure of the work’s display(s). This raises a question about the user’s opportunities to be creative — to engage in creative interactions with a work — and how these opportunities can be supported or constrained by the artist’s design. In order to answer this question, we need to unpack the notion of creative control. In addition, we need to consider how creativity can be attributed to multiple agents involved at different stages of a work’s production. As it turns out, the case of AI art is particularly useful when considering the conditions of creativity and creative collaboration.

There is already a robust debate about the nature of creativity as it occurs in many different areas of human activity (see, e.g., Gaut & Kieran, eds., 2018; Paul & Kaufman, eds., 2014) There is a case to be made, however, that this debate can be enriched by drawing on work in the philosophy of AI. In everyday life, sophisticated AI systems are now being used for all kinds of purposes: We rely on these systems when we use Internet search engines, play strategic videogames, accept purchasing recommendations from online retailers, and check for viruses on our computers. In addition, we can use AI to generate new images and text, some of which can be incorporated into works of art. One can type a series of prompts into a chatbot like ChatGPT in order to generate a new screenplay in a certain genre. Similarly, one can assemble a set of images on which to train an “artbot” like MidJourney in order to generate paintings, drawings, or what look like photographs. It is common to attribute creative agency to the person who purposively initiates, and then monitors, the program used to generate the images or text that make up a work of AI art. A question remains, however, as to whether this should be the sole creative attribution when AI is involved. Some artists describe the AI system with which they work as a creative “partner”, and not just a sophisticated artistic tool. This is particularly the case with recent artworks that rely on “Deep Learning” (DL) to generate images or text in a remarkably independent way. Both chatbots and artbots rely on deep learning to categorize huge datasets (images or text) according to previously undetected patterns. To do this, a DL system must give itself new instructions — ones that depart from the initial instructions of the program — for the kind of image or text segment, and for the particular image or text segment, to be produced.

Among AI artists, the ones who write their own DL programs are the most likely to describe AI as a creative partner rather than just a creative tool. This seems particularly fitting when there is a synchronous collaboration between the artist and their DL system. For example, the works of Sougwen Chun are the result of Chun drawing alongside and in response to the actions of a mechanical drawing arm that is controlled by Chun’s custom-made program, D.O.U.G. (short for “Drawing Operations Unity Generation X ”). Chun and D.O.U.G. take turns adding to a single drawing. During this process, it is harder than one might think to say what makes the difference such that Chun is a creative agent, engaged in a creative drawing process, and D.O.U.G. is not. This is the case even though it is Chun alone who comes up with the idea for the work and initiates the drawing program.

As Margaret Boden has argued (2014), when philosophers deny the possibility of a computer ever being creative, they tend to underestimate the capacities of computers to produce items that are genuinely new as well as valuable in some domain. Still, many creativity theorists argue that novelty and value are insufficient for creativity; a third condition is needed, one concerning the manner of production. In order for something novel and valuable to count as creative, it must have been produced in a way that is agent-driven. The agency condition can be filled out, or broken down, in a variety of ways. At its core, however, the notion of agency is generally assumed to be opposed to the notion of having been ‘programmed’, or simply instructed, to perform certain tasks in a “mechanical”, or blind, fashion. Thus, the most basic objection to the possibility of creative computers is that they can only do what they are programmed to do, according to the intentions of a human agent. This objection needs clarification, however, since no set of rules completely determines the actions involved in following that set of rules. Since the advent of DL and other kinds of generative algorithm, it is possible for a computer program to change itself, to detect independent phenomena other than the ones that it was designed to detect, and to mimic spontaneity through randomness. Is this an instance of creative rule-following? If it is, we might expand our notion of creative collaboration. Perhaps creative collaboration is found, not just between human beings, but also between human beings and machines. In so far as the machines in question support strong interactivity, a work of digital art might involve three-part collaborations between human artists, human users, and AI.

Digital media can also be used for the purpose of connecting physical locations to virtual ones by using locative media. The phrase “locative art” is traced to Karlis Kalnins who applied the phrase to experimental projects coming from Locative Media Lab, a collective of international researchers and practitioners working with locative media. (Galloway & Ward 2005 ). Since the term “locative” is connected to location, site-specificity plays a significant role in our appreciation of locative works. Unlike with non-digital cases, however, site-specificity in locative art is both physical and virtual. The general concept is this: locative-specific media connect physical spaces with virtual ones, the perceptual features of which are generated from a digital device by human interactions. We often experience locative media in our ordinary and daily lives through navigation systems like Google Maps or Waze, and also creatively through augmented reality apps like Pokemon Go, AR graffiti (an app that allows users to visualize what their graffiti will look like in situ ), architectural simulators, and more. These are location-based works, often called locative projects or locative art, that use locative media. While locative technology has been around for decades, it is a relatively new subcategory to be recognized within the arts. Even so, locative art is more broadly acknowledged in the fields of technology, games, and sociology.

To understand the many ways locative media might be used for artistic practice, consider the following three examples.

• What Was There (2010–2023) was a website that allows users to type in the coordinates of their current location (via their digital device) to see how certain geographical locations look throughout history. By typing a specific address into the application, the user experiences the physical location in front of them and represented images and facts of that location as they appeared in the past, from the same vantage point. Data on the site relies on regular citizens to upload historic images and connect them to specific locations, making them accessible to others; the greater the participation the richer the experience when navigating a particular place. Not only can guests gain a deeper connection to their specific localized places, but such applications motivate people to explore and appreciate locations outside of their normal destinations.
• The Transborder Immigrant Tool has been used in a number of artworks and exhibitions.

The Transborder Immigrant Tool, devised by Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, was a mobile phone application intended to guide individuals who were making their way to the United States through the deserts of the U.S./Mexico borderlands to water. The application delivered poetry to its users in an effort to assist in their emotional and mental well-being while offering information about survival during the dangerous journey. The creators of The Transborder Immigrant Tool considered it to be a performance intervention that included the app itself, its API, public reactions, and an ensuing government investigation. By the time TBT was ready for distribution in 2011, the border crossing had become more dangerous, presenting the risk that carrying a TBT phone might put users in danger. While the project was never distributed to its intended users, it still succeeded in confounding systems of political control, creating a call to action that resonated internationally, and using poetry to “dissolve” the US-Mexico border (Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 et al 2007).

• KlingKlangKlong is played with smartphones that translate the players’ locations into sound. This is achieved in a straightforward manner: By moving through the physical space, the players simultaneously move on the surface of a virtual sequencer. One dimension (usually the latitude of the player) corresponds to pitch, the other dimension (longitude) is mapped to the time-position on the sequencer. The interface allows a manual switch to other audio parameters, although this feature is experimental. Each device receives the location and state changes of the currently active players almost instantly. The devices are connected by a central server, which also sets the boundaries of the playing field and manages the virtual players.

KlingKlangKlong serves as an experimental arrangement to explore the idea of playful (social) systems, a construction where human and virtual subsystems play with each other. In addition to the human participants, it therefore deploys a number of virtual players (»Virtuals«). Humans and Virtuals meet each other in mixed reality, a concept that was realized in early locative games. The commonly created soundtrack is the primary medium of communication between the players. Musical structures may temporarily arise through synchronized movements or be destroyed by any player’s intervention (Straeubig & Quack 2016).

In each of these examples, users synchronize geographical locations with virtual ones, granting mobility for users while also further challenging the paradigm of museum-driven works and art appreciation. The interactivity described in section 4 factors significantly into each of these projects, but also of importance are the social, economic, environmental, and political implications that factor in the design, development, and use of such works. Most of these projects are intended to bring about positive change, one way or another, by using locative media and by borrowing certain gaming mechanics for the purpose of engagement and interactivity. In fact, much of what is written about locative art is from fields within digital media studies on the media’s ‘playable’ qualities (avoiding the idea that artists are trying to merely gamify public spaces).

On the playable nature of locative art, Miguel Sicart says,

the data produced and used in smart cities should not necessarily be presented as a utility for citizens. It should be presented as a prop for play, as games but also as the source for toys and playgrounds. Data-rich cities can become playable cities, and, by becoming such, they can become more human, more inclusive spaces (Ackermann: 2016, 27).

Once again, the process-oriented and performative nature of locative works is central to appreciating the spaces they create. In connection with the playability of locative media, locative projects are also modifiable and typically intended to be hackable by the public in the communities where they are displayed. While the terms “hacker” and “hacking” may carry negative connotations, in its original conception, the practice of hacking was meant to improve upon existing computer programs, acknowledging the achievements of both the original creator and subsequent revisionists (Levy:1984). It is in this vein that locative projects are usually intended to change and improve over time given how users “play” with the data and inputs. In other words, local communities can play with these projects and even modify them, making locative works as relevant and reflective of the community as possible.

The above suggests that locative projects often have broader goals than mere entertainment. Although often intended to motivate play and playful attitudes, which, as indicated in the examples above can occur to varying degrees, the goal-oriented nature of locative works often makes the kind of play involved a “serious” kind. Serious play occurs when the enjoyment and pleasure that come from play do not just comprise entertainment but also serve some meritorious, real-world goal. A work can be said to support serious play even when users are not aware of the social or political goals of the work.

The customizable nature of locative media lends itself well to the altruistic aims of many locative artists. However, inclusivity, climate protection, social change, and any other desired effect of locative projects requires a given community to have sufficient funds for, access to, and user-knowledge about digital locative technology. This concern can also be understood, not just in terms of community requirements, but also in terms of technological requirements, for successful locative art. One way of putting it is as follows:

For any technological device to be “aware” of its context—physical or otherwise—it has to be able to locate, classify, collect, store, and use “relevant” information, as well as to identify and discard or ignore “irrelevant” information (Galloway & Ward 2005).

There are numerous political and economic factors affecting access to local and global spaces. With locative art, these factors are concerning for both ethical and artistic reasons.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Thomson-Jones, Katherine, 2014, Philosophy of Film , in Oxford Bibliographies Online .
• Enlighten, “WhatWasThere” (2010–2023) [ WhatWasThere available online ] [ archive link ]
• Gottfried Michael Koenig Project
• Austin Museum of Digital Art
• Digital Art Museum
• Rhizome’s Artbase , the largest on-line archive of new media art
• Digital Art & Design – Victoria and Albert Museum , information on the history and practice of computer art and design.
• The Whitney Museum’s Art Port , providing access to the museum’s collection of digital art and an exhibition space for commissioned works of net art.

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Digital vs. Traditional Art: A Comparative Analysis of Contemporary Preferences.

In the ever-evolving world of art, a fascinating and profound shift has been occurring in recent years, sparking a spirited debate among artists, enthusiasts, and critics alike. This transformation revolves around the choice between digital and traditional art mediums, which has become a defining dilemma for contemporary artists. In this article, we delve into the heart of this discourse, embarking on a comparative analysis of contemporary preferences to shed light on the intricate dynamics between digital and traditional art.

As we explore the merits, drawbacks, and evolving perceptions surrounding these two contrasting artistic realms, we aim to provide valuable insights into the ongoing dialogue that is shaping the future of artistic expression.

Digital Art

Digital art represents a contemporary form of artistic expression that thrives on cutting-edge digital technology. Artists in this medium harness the power of computer software, scanners, cameras, and an array of digital tools to craft their creations. What distinguishes digital art is its capacity to exist in multiple dimensions, encompassing two-dimensional works, three-dimensional sculptures, and dynamic animated pieces. The versatility and boundary-pushing potential of digital art make it an exciting and constantly evolving facet of the artistic world.

Traditional Art

This art stands as a timeless and enduring pillar of artistic expression, rooted in the use of physical materials and age-old tools. This expansive category encompasses a rich tapestry of artistic disciplines, ranging from painting and drawing to sculpture and printmaking. Traditional artists rely on tangible resources such as oil paint, acrylic paint, watercolor paint, charcoal, graphite, and clay to breathe life into their artistic visions. This enduring form of art pays homage to the historical legacy of human creativity while still offering boundless opportunities for innovation and interpretation.

Advantages of Digital Art

Versatility: Digital art is renowned for its remarkable versatility, capable of accommodating a vast spectrum of artistic styles and techniques. Artists can seamlessly transition between various styles, experimenting with different mediums and approaches within a digital environment.

Accessibility: One of the standout advantages of digital art is its accessibility. Unlike traditional art, which may necessitate costly materials and specialized tools, digital art primarily requires a computer and software. This affordability and accessibility democratize the world of art, enabling a more diverse range of artists to participate and thrive.

Reproducibility: Digital art offers the unique advantage of easy reproduction and instant sharing. Artists can effortlessly duplicate their work and disseminate it to a global audience via the Internet. This accessibility fosters a wider appreciation and recognition of their creations.

Editability: The malleability of digital art stands as a distinct advantage, especially for artists in the developmental stages of their craft. Digital artworks can be easily edited, refined, or modified without the constraints imposed by physical media. This adaptability empowers artists to explore and refine their creative visions continuously.

Disadvantages of Digital Art

Lack of Physicality: Digital art, while incredibly versatile, lacks the tangible physicality of traditional art. This absence of tactile elements can sometimes hinder the appreciation of subtle nuances in the artwork, as viewers are unable to experience it through touch and texture.

Longevity: Digital art faces a potential drawback in terms of longevity. Unlike traditional art, which can endure for centuries if properly preserved, digital artworks are susceptible to the ravages of time in a different manner. Data loss, format obsolescence, and the transient nature of technology can threaten the preservation of digital creations.

Authorship Challenges: Authenticating digital art can be a complex endeavor due to the ease of replication and distribution in the digital realm. The challenge of asserting authorship and preventing unauthorized copying raises important questions regarding ownership and intellectual property in the digital art landscape.

Contemporary Preferences for Digital vs. Traditional Art

While digital art has become increasingly popular in recent years, traditional art forms continue to hold a special place in the hearts of many art enthusiasts. So, what are the contemporary preferences for digital vs. traditional art?

According to a recent survey, the majority of respondents (57%) prefer traditional art to digital art. However, there is a significant difference in preferences between age groups. Millennials (ages 25–40) and Gen Z (ages 10–24) are more likely to prefer digital art than older generations.

There are a number of factors that may contribute to these preferences. One factor is accessibility. Digital art is more accessible than traditional art, as it does not require specialized materials or tools. Additionally, digital art can be easily created and shared online.

Another factor that may contribute to the popularity of digital art is its versatility. Digital art can be used to create a wide range of artistic styles, from realistic paintings to abstract sculptures. Additionally, digital art can be used to create animations and other interactive media.

However, traditional art forms also have a number of advantages. One advantage is that traditional art is more physical and tangible than digital art. This can make traditional art more engaging and immersive for the viewer.

Additionally, traditional art is often seen as being more valuable and collectible than digital art. This is because traditional art is often unique and one-of-a-kind.

Ultimately, the best type of art is the one that you enjoy the most. Whether you prefer digital art or traditional art, there is no right or wrong answer. Both forms of art have their own unique advantages and disadvantages.

The Future of Digital vs. Traditional Art

It is difficult to predict the future of digital vs. traditional art. However, it is likely that both forms of art will continue to coexist and thrive. Digital art is likely to continue to grow in popularity as it becomes increasingly accessible and versatile. However, traditional art forms will also continue to be appreciated for their physicality, uniqueness, and value.

Additionally, we are likely to see a continued trend towards hybrid art, which combines elements of digital art and traditional art. This hybrid approach allows artists to benefit from the strengths of both digital art and traditional art.

In the end, the best way to decide which type of art you prefer is to explore different options and experiment with different materials and techniques.

It is also important to note that there is a growing trend towards hybrid art, which combines elements of digital art and traditional art. For example, some artists may use digital tools to create sketches or concepts and then use traditional materials to create the final artwork. This hybrid approach allows artists to benefit from the strengths of both digital art and traditional art.

What do you think?

Written by DMHP Prabhath

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Home — Essay Samples — Information Science and Technology — Digital Era — Why Digital Art Is Better Than Traditional Art

Why Digital Art is Better than Traditional Art

• Categories: Digital Era

About this sample

Words: 471 |

Published: Dec 16, 2021

Words: 471 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Works Cited

• Anderson, S. (2020). The Digital Renaissance: How Technology is Transforming Art. New York: Thames & Hudson.
• Johnson, E. (2018). The Advantages of Digital Art for Beginners. Artwork Archive. Retrieved from https://www.artworkarchive.com/blog/the-advantages-of-digital-art-for-beginners
• Landa, R. (2018). Digital Painting Techniques: Practical Techniques of Digital Art Masters. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge.
• Adobe. (n.d.). Adobe Photoshop. Retrieved from https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop.html
• Autodesk. (n.d.). Autodesk Sketchbook. Retrieved from https://www.autodesk.com/products/sketchbook
• Smith, J. (2019). Traditional Art vs. Digital Art: Which is Right for You? Medium. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@jadesmithauthor/traditional-art-vs-digital-art-which-is-right-for-you-85500c1f0149
• Creative Bloq. (n.d.). The Best Drawing Tablets in 2023. Retrieved from https://www.creativebloq.com/buying-guides/best-drawing-tablet
• ArtRage. (n.d.). ArtRage. Retrieved from https://www.artrage.com/
• Chen, M., & Li, L. (2021). Exploring the Advantages of Digital Art Education in a Post-pandemic World. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 40(1), 148-163.
• Clark, J., & Iskin, R. (Eds.). (2022). The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History. New York: Routledge.

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Digital Vs. Traditional Art: Is One Better Than the Other?

Can you identify what all of these careers have in common: Social Media Manager, Lyft Driver, Podcast Producer, Mobile App Developer, Virtual Assistant, 3-D Printer Technician, and Content Marketer? They are all related to technology, but 15 years ago many of these jobs didn’t exist .

We are currently teaching and preparing our students for future careers that don’t yet exist. A study conducted by the Institute for the Future (IFTF) and Dell Technologies concludes that 85% of the jobs that will exist in 2030 haven’t even been created yet. All of these careers will exist because of the ever-changing nature of technology. It’s something that isn’t going away, which is why more schools are infusing digital arts curriculum.

According to the 2019 State of Art Education Survey , 52.2% of art teachers want to learn more about teaching digital art effectively. However, only 21.9% of art teachers feel comfortable teaching a digital arts curriculum.

The want and need to teach digital medium is there, but is it truly important to teach? Will digital art take the place of traditional artmaking?

The Importance of Digital Arts Education

Some view technology as a threat to originality and as seeking to replace traditional artmaking. This idea can certainly be worrisome for art teachers. However, studies suggest the use of digital tools in art education increases artistic development and creativity. In a digital age, art teachers feel the need now more than ever to advocate for their programs. A digital arts curriculum can serve as a powerful advocacy tool.

Here are some of the benefits of teaching digital art in your classroom:

1. Increased Access

Not every student has a set of watercolors or acrylic paint set at home, but many students have access to some type of digital device like an iPad or smartphone. Sure, devices might not be cheap initially, but in comparison to all the consumable tubes of oil paint an artist might buy in a year, the one-time technology purchase makes sense. Yes, technology breaks and needs replacing, but so do paintbrushes and canvases.

2. Convenience

Carrying around the necessary art materials to create as you’d like isn’t always convenient. It’s not always realistic to carry around a set up for plein air painting or to fill up a water cup for watercolor. It can be a hassle. Creating with a digital medium is relatively hassle-free. You can carry your device with you almost everywhere, and it’s always ready when you are ready to create.

3. Instant Sharability

Because digital art creation is already stored on a digital device, it is easier for artists to share their work in it’s highest form. Work can be shared digitally on websites and through social media instantly. Sure, a photograph of a painting doesn’t usually do the physical features of the painting justice, but it can communicate the overall idea.

4. Increased Productivity

Creating digitally saves time. If you make a mistake on a digital drawing or painting, you can simply press the undo button to start over. In a digital creation, you can erase without a trace, change colors easily, and position and resize objects in seconds. You are not limited by the physical features of the material world.

Why Traditional Art Matters

Digital art requires no less skill than traditional artmaking, but it does require a different mode of thinking. Yes, a digital device will have the ability to make a stroke look and layer like watercolor or give the texture of drawing with charcoal. However, when one learns traditional art techniques, they gain a deeper understanding of the materials and what they can do.

Here are some of the benefits of traditional artmaking methods:

1. Hands-on Experiences

Learning to manipulate a paintbrush to create different paint strokes or using carving tools to create a sculpture provides a physical, tactile experience. Through this experience, you gain a broader view of how materials can be used. The physical creation is good for hand-eye coordination as well as motor skills. Mixing yellow and blue paint to create green is an experience one cannot get the same way by digitally mixing colors.

2. Unique Pieces

Because of the handmade nature of traditional artworks, they aren’t easily reproduced. Each creation is truly a one-of-a-kind piece, unlike a digital creation that can be reproduced and shared instantly. Because of this, traditional art pieces typically have more value than digital art pieces.

3. Increased Versatility

Digital is only one medium while traditional art methods allow you to create with different media. Creating an image with graphite compared to pigmented paint will yield different results and experiences. The outcome of digital art creation typically produces one look of a clean finished product, whereas using different art materials does not.

4. Forced Problem-Solving

Unlike the undo button on a digital device, mistakes can’t always be easily erased. This restriction forces an artist to problem-solve their solution to physically fix their error. Better yet, it encourages an artist to no longer make those mistakes and ultimately improves their skills.

How to Start Infusing Digital Art into your Curriculum

There is no magic to digital tools. The magic comes from how we teach our students to foster their creativity. Generations before us have been using new technologies in different forms. Using chalk on chalkboards and pencils on paper were once novel ideas. Taking a boring worksheet and putting it on an iPad doesn’t make it exciting; it’s still going to be boring.

Exceptional learning can happen with or without advanced technologies, but when it’s done right, it can increase experiences. If you’re not ready to fully immerse yourself in the world of technology, look for ways you can ease in. Instead of replacing traditional artmaking methods completely, look for ways you can enhance them. Assess the concepts that aren’t going well in your classroom; could taking a digital approach improve the process? For example, teaching one-point perspective drawing can be a chore, but learning it digitally might make the process easier while learning the same concepts. Creativity will be the skill of the future. What can we do to help our students gain creative insight within our teaching?

If you’re not sure how to start infusing digital art into your curriculum check out these resources.

• Digital Photography Basics PRO Learning Pack
• Discovering Photoshop Basics PRO Learning Pack
• Digital Animation PRO Learning Pack
• 3-D Printing Basics PRO Learning Pack
• iPads in the Art Room AOEU Course
• 10 Digital Art Projects That Will Spark Student Creativity
• Everyone Can Create Curriculum by Apple
• The Digital Art Teacher
• Digital Art for Beginners by Udemy

Technology isn’t going anywhere, and it will continue to evolve at an ever-changing speed. There’s no doubt that both traditional and digital art creation are essential. As educators, we need to find ways to use them together to create the best learning opportunities we can for our students.

What’s holding you back from teaching digital art?

Why do you feel teaching both digital and traditional artmaking is essential?

Magazine articles and podcasts are opinions of professional education contributors and do not necessarily represent the position of the Art of Education University (AOEU) or its academic offerings. Contributors use terms in the way they are most often talked about in the scope of their educational experiences.

Abby Schukei

Abby Schukei, a middle school art educator and AOEU’s Social Media Manager, is a former AOEU Writer. She focuses on creating meaningful experiences for her students through technology integration, innovation, and creativity.

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Digital Art: Why Is It Gaining Popularity?

• November 9, 2021

Digital art has existed for over thirty years, but it’s only now getting the mainstream spotlight. According to Statista, global online art and antique sales amounted to $12.4 billion in 2020, rising from $6 billion in 2019. 

In particular, digital art sales increased substantially in 2020 , rising from $4.8 billion in 2019 to approximately $7.9 billion. 

This sales trend is expected to continue into 2022, with the notable highlight of 2021 already being the sale of the digital art piece titled “ Everydays: The First 5000 Days ” by Mike Winkelmann (professionally known as Beeple).

On March 11th, 2021, Beeple sold an NFT of his JPG file artwork for a record-breaking $69.3 million . This unique digital art piece was a collage of all the images Beeple had posted online each day since 2007. 

Generally, 2021 has altogether seen the popularity of digital art skyrocket, mainly due to the authentication possibilities presented by NFT technology. So, what is all the digital art fuss about?

What is digital art?

Digital art is essentially any artistic work that utilises digital technology as an indispensable part of the creation or presentation process. Others define it as an art form in which computer technology is leveraged in a wide diversity of ways to achieve distinctive work.

Since the 70s, different names have been employed to symbolise digital art, such as computer art and multimedia art. However, the core principle of exclusively creating art using computers and specific types of applications (vector applications) to create art remains the same today.

Despite seeming like a niche space, digital art spans an incredibly broad spectrum of mediums, from animations, digital paintings to even 3D printed sculptures.

Types of digital art

• Dynamic paintings: As the most advanced form of digital art, dynamic paintings are created in a process that involves a computer that paints a picture, or art with minimal physical labour.

Digital Art Exhibition Review Essay

Introduction, digital exhibition, digital art criteria, digital virgin, digital dancer, reference list.

Digital or new media art has greatly transformed the world or art. Digital art emerged in the 1970s and has gained immense popularity with advancement in digital technology. Prior to the digital art era, modern art was more prevalent. Sometimes, digital art is often grouped as a form of modern art but comparing it with most modern art works, it is evident that there is significant difference.

New medial or digital art therefore refers to a variety artistic works prepared using digital technology (Miller 2008, p. 31). Other phrases such as multimedia and computer art are also used to refer to digital art and all the artistic work the common features are referred to as new media art. Uri Dotan is one of the most successful digital artists.

Based in New York, the artist has many artistic works under his name. Uri Dotan’s works of art are common in many exhibitions not only in New York but also in other parts of the world. With advancement in internet technology, many artists have resorted to online exhibit to display their works of art. In this paper, I will review Uri Dotan digital art online exhibit.

Digital art has wide usage in advertisement and filmmaking. It plays a significant role in the modern world where graphic representation has found wide use in the field of marketing. The wide usage of the internet has also created very significant ground for growth of digital art.

Digital art can be created in various ways. Some of the artistic works are purely computer-generate while other could be generated from other sources. The works of arts could be generated through scanning, vector graphics and other technologies (Christiane 2006, p. 46). The works of art therefore can refer to works of arts created through other means and later transformed using a computer program.

Uri Dotan’s online art exhibit is one of the most fantastic online exhibitions to visit. Unlike conventional art exhibit, online art exhibit is accessed from any place in the world, as long as one has internet connection. Online exhibit is therefore open to large audiences. With many upcoming artists, online exhibition provides an efficient ways for displaying artistic works to the public. Uri Dotan is a skilled artist as demonstrated in his works of art. The common theme in his artistic works is that of influence of technology.

In his works of arts, the artist is able to take his audience many years ahead of their time. Using his skills in digital art, the artists capture his imagination of the future. Digital art is first of all created in the mind of the artist before being projected electronically (Churchill 2007, para. 3). Uri Dotan demonstrates his imagination as he takes us fifty years ahead of our time through his skills by creating artwork that shows influence of technology on society (The Williams Gallery 2008, para. 2).

The extraordinary Uri Dotan’s sculptures and paintings exist in digital world. The artistic works appealing to the eye right from the first pages of the online exhibition.

To review an exhibition successfully, one need to use some criteria. Each style of art has some expected criteria. Although the criteria are not explicit, an artist using a particular artistic knows the standard that his or her work or art should meet. Digital art style in one of the challenging styles to analyze.

This is above all due to the dynamic nature of the style where digital artists keep coming up with new things every now and then (Wands 2007, p. 79). Digital art mainly comprise of paintings, sculpture and other work of art that have been transformed using digital technology. For digital art to be considered to be successful, It should be able demonstrate relationship with the work of art from which it was obtained. Uri Dotan is able to demonstrate this as looking at his work one knows that he or she is looking an artistic work.

The second criterion that Uri Dotan is able to demonstrate in his work is that is able to the medium as a tool to communicate his message rather than as an end. Their criterion that Uri Dotan is able to demonstrate in his work is originality. All the artistic works in the exhibit are not derived from other people’s works but they are original. The last important criterion of good work of art demonstrated in Uri Dotan work is life. All his works of art have life in themselves and therefore, they are able to be appealing to eyes.

The first artistic work to be encountered is given the name Virgin. The beautiful digital painting is an abstract sculpture. The digital Venus is created in an architectural space giving it an outstanding pose (The Williams Gallery 2008, para. 4). The painting is composed in a vertical rectangle with figure centered. The painting is movable and recognizable; it as if the artist is welcoming his audience to view his remaining works of art.

The second artistic work in the online exhibit is referred to as Digital dance. The artwork is comprised of bright strips of metal. The work is poised vertically by use of architectural space (The Williams Gallery 2008, para. 6). Although all these are features of a conventional work, there is no doubt when looking art work that one is looking and a virtual sculpture. Although virtual, the artwork is able draw emotions of creativity associated with world of art rather than technological environment.

Uri Dotan’s proficiency in digital art continues to unfold as one meets his other works. The second phase of his exhibits begins with a figure which is more mural Navado-like. Tree leaves and sticks have also been used to symbolize hair and the hand. A pedestal, in three dimensions, sits in front of the mural. Beneath this figure, a keen observe is able to what looks like human feet.

Uri Danton’s artistic demonstrate his command in digital art. The artist is able to explore various styles in his artistic work. For his fifth piece of work (labeled Hummingbird), Uri Danton has decided to make use of an angle and walls, as opposed to the all too familiar rectangle (The Williams Gallery 2008, para. 7). The image is not completely enclosed but some of its parts come out of the case.

The image seems complicated with shadow falling on the wall. In total, there are eight Uri Dotan’s artistic works in the online exhibit. All the eight digital images are wonderful and they demonstrate Dotan’s proficiency as a digital artist. The artist is able to create spaces and fill them with desired figure.

Digital art is a major revolution in the world of art. Advancement in digital technology has provided artists with a tool not only to create new images but also transform old works of art. Uri Dotan has demonstrated his skills as a digital artist. In the online exhibit, his work comes out as of high quality and skillful.

Christiane, P., 2008, Digital art . New York: Thames & Hudson.

Churchill, S., 2007. The Art of Digital Show. Web.

Miller, R., 2008, Digital Art: Painting With Pixels . New York: Twenty-First Century Books.

The Williams Gallery., 2008. Uri Dotan . Web.

Wands, B., 2007, Art of the digital age . New York: Thames & Hudson.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, January 20). Digital Art Exhibition Review. https://ivypanda.com/essays/digital-art-exhibition-review/

"Digital Art Exhibition Review." IvyPanda , 20 Jan. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/digital-art-exhibition-review/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'Digital Art Exhibition Review'. 20 January.

IvyPanda . 2024. "Digital Art Exhibition Review." January 20, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/digital-art-exhibition-review/.

1. IvyPanda . "Digital Art Exhibition Review." January 20, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/digital-art-exhibition-review/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Digital Art Exhibition Review." January 20, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/digital-art-exhibition-review/.

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Click names or images to take the MOCA tour WHAT IS DIGITAL ART? Photographer, artist and philosopher Larry Bolch wrote, "Photography is not an art. It is a medium through which artist's may create art." One can make the same statement about so called "digital art". Considering digital as a medium for the creation of art, rather than an art itself doesn't help narrow it down much, however; because then you have to wonder; "which art?" Perhaps a better way to state the problem, today, is to ask; "What isn't digital art?" Computers have invaded and expanded nearly every art form. From the digital creation, recording, manipulation and distribution of music, to animation and film editing; from word processing to the instantaneous cueing of hundreds of complex theatrical lighting and scenery changes digital tools are there helping artists make art. Yet, if you are an artist making two-dimensional compositions for display on the web or for sale as any of a wide variety of print you may expect some strange resistance and lack of external validation. No one seems to question the authenticity of a digitally performed theatrical cue or to worry that the word processor has made writing too easy. Now that the computer has replaced the mathematician's chalkboard, pencil and slide rule, no one asks, by virtue of the tools or lack of materials used; "Is that real math or did the computer do it?" Still, as pervasive as digital tools have become in the creation of a wide range of art forms these questions are asked of two-dimensional inanimate art created on a computer. For the sake of this review this is what I mean by "digital art". And, with the help of some wonderful examples collected here by the MOCA gallery, we will look to where this work has come and perhaps shed some light on the path ahead. PLAYING THE MUSIC Bolch also observed, "the artist chooses the media and the goal of every artist is to become fluent enough with the media to transcend it. At some point you pass from playing the piano to playing music." As digital tools are employed by more artists working in more diverse fields the analogies that for so long have attempted to describe the commonalties of all art forms begin to come into sharper focus. The writer, musician, painter, the film editor or photographer sit down before pretty much the same sort of art making devise and share the common craft of digital information processing to achieve the work; making it immediately clear how poetry can share a kinship to painting, photography and music. Well over a decade of practice and experimentation in making digital art has brought to the scene artists possessing a fine degree of skill with imaging software. And, yet the average person or art lover knows little of what a digital artist does to create their work. Software salesman are of little help, since they work hard to promote the myth that art on a computer is just a mouse click away. Compared to painting which, even though few can handle expertly, nearly all can understand the process; the learning curve for the appreciation of digital art seems almost as steep as for the manipulation of the tools themselves. However, this is not an excuse for the critic or art lover who refuses to seriously consider digital art simply because they don't know how it is made. Art is not about the tools used to make it; but in the organization of color, line, form, composition, rhythm and the interplay of all these in support of the subject matter or intent of the work itself. These are the basic and well established tenants of visual art and as fundamental to digital art work as to the cave paintings of Lascaux. DIGITAL PAINT AND DRAW : Natural Media This point is best demonstrated by work created with "Natural Media" software. The digital artist working in this vein has an assortment of tools designed to make marks which simulate on the computer screen and in print nearly all traditional paint and draw tools. In the MOCA galleries the works of Mavi Roberto , Joan Myerson Shrager , Jago Titcomb , D.L. Zimmerman , and Steiner Rosenburg are prime examples of this genre of digital art. Their pictures are built up mark upon mark until the composition is complete. The look and even a good part of the feel of traditional drawing and painting media can be achieved with skill and patience. That these marks appear as pure light on a glass screen is indication of both the revolutionary advances and the tradeoffs that the digital artist makes. New production techniques such as multiple undo, and the ability to save work at various stages along its development and to integrate one version or piece of art seamlessly into another are great boons to art making. Digital work never reaches that level of material preciousness at which even the most courageous painter would not risk destroying their work just to follow some wild inspiration. The digital artist has adopted a medium that works as fast as one's imagination and presents constant opportunities to refine composition and fine tune color. On the other hand, spontaneous accidents and the effects of gravity do not come easy in digital media and often what can be achieved in a single looping wet drippy stroke of paint must be rendered laboriously by the digital artist. Not having to stretch canvas, wash brushes or mix and then wait for paint to dry may deny the digital artist some material pleasures, but also saves time. While elapsed time is certainly not an issue nor a criterion for judging any piece of art, time saved using digital tools is almost always re-invested in experimentation and decision making. Subsequently, this investment in design should make digital art among the tightest and most well considered compositions in art today. DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY: Photo-Manipulation With the genre of "Photo-Manipulation" we recognize how much digital art shares with the art form of photography. The first highly technologically driven art making system to suffer the burden of "point and click" simplicity, traditional photography had to wait out the proliferation of popular understanding of the process and the subsequent recognition by the masses of the nuances necessary to create great pictures before gaining its rightful place in the world of fine art. Today this struggle belongs to digital art. But it is digital photography and the lessons learned by traditional photography's move up to fine art that is helping to drive the ultimate acceptance of digital art. And, in return, the digital darkroom has revolutionized how we make photographic art. Producing sensitive imagery in the tradition of the chemical dark room, as we see reflected in the work of Jeff Alu , Steve Bingham , and Ricardo Baez Duarte required tedious and imperfect techniques that are now achieved with unprecedented speed and pin point control by artists who have more time to focus on ideas and composition than the long process of trial and error that was necessary leading to a degree of control over wet photography. Digital photography tools reduce exposure to dangerous and uncomfortable studio situations while expanding aesthetic potentials through new production techniques. And, this particular expanded aesthetic is with us constantly in our daily lives. DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY: Photo-Collage As photography reached a level of maturity in the 1920's and 30's many modernist artists began to experiment with different techniques of using photos in their art; among them the collage and montage. In the USA during the1950's the fad of psychoanalysis coupled with the advertising industry's discovery that surrealistic imagery in its attention to sex and other dreams of desire was highly marketable; fostered an enduring love for "trick photography". It is no small coincidence that a couple of decades later page layout, photo-editing and typography harbored the first mass oriented implementation of digital imaging tools. The advertising and magazine industry jumped at the chance to have one machine that could handle all these different crafts and it has never looked back. Thus, "photo-collage" represented in the MOCA collection by the work of artists Damnengine , Larry Hopewell , and Gulner Guvenc has become the most prevalent kind of digital art exhibited anywhere, today. Collage is most often the kind of art that people seek to do with their new computers and, as such, has formed a populist wave of art making that can hardly be ignored. DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY: Tabloid Culture Even before photography became a fine art it was a popular one. Due, in no small part, to what philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin called the "voodoo cult" of photography. That is, the ability for a photograph to freeze time and preserve people, places and events long after they disappear in the mists of memory. Therefore, the photograph, even a simple and personal snap shot, is a very potent item, whose aura in our everyday lives can surpass that of art. Of course, along with this reverence comes the reverse and the purposeful mutilation of a photograph can harbor a darker spirit. This darker spirit has become quite popular in itself as a post modern society turns to themes and activities previously considered "on the fringe". I ascribe the term "Tabloid Culture" to this type of art as a nod to the marginality from which it is ascending and to the media which has made it so relatively accessible. And, of course, digital tools are there helping it happen. The highest form of this art is displayed in the MOCA galleries of Alessandro Bavari , David Ho , and Shannon Hourigan . And, while these artists use techniques and tools outside of the range of simple photo-manipulation, their intent to create dark, mysterious, uncomfortable and often allegorical illustrations with amazing photographic realism is quite evident and striking. On the other hand, the dark collages of Shannon Hourigan retain more of the character of a direct photograph. In doing so, Hourigan manages to create work that fully exploits this voodoo concept of photography and in the disfiguration and distortions of her photgraphic images questions of violence, body image and self mutilation are given full voice. THE QUEST FOR PRESENCE: Fractals In and of itself, however, paint is paint. Photography and even collage are no longer anything new. And, since we already know that art is not about the tools that we use to make it; we might rightfully ask, so what's new about digital art? For well over two hundred years the world of fine art and its counterpart in academia have been driven by the notion of stylistic identification and innovation thus creating the age of "isms". Art work has come to be judged either by how well it fits into an existing style, or is favored most when it breaks beyond these prized barriers and delivers something all together and strikingly new. For digital art to join in this time honored game, to become present in the world of Fine Arts, it must move beyond mimicry of traditional media and forge new visual ground. In order to survey this new territory the artist must search for those things that no other visual arts tools can do. For example, computers are number crunching machines with a propensity for diligently performing tedious tasks at lightning speeds; data in data out. This was of little value to the visual artist until 1972 when Benoit Mandelbrot brought together his own scattered research in "self similarity and iteration" and named it "fractal geometry". Almost instantly from that point through today the science of mapping the hidden geometry of nature has been a visual matter. Fractal geometry provides the mathematical algorithms that are the virtual backbone of many of the unique tools that digital image editing and generating software are built upon. For certain artists this means the creation of imagery that is both excitingly new and strangely familiar as seen in the MOCA galleries of artists Janet Parke and Karin Kuhlmann . Fractals are patently beautiful with breathtaking depth, sumptuous color, dynamic flowing lines that tickle and delight the eye. In their repetition of forms is suggested the math of the eternal. As such, fractal imagery is often powerful and always seductive. And, yet fractals while wildly varied are still highly recognizable "formula based" images. This makes working with fractals some of the edgiest digital work being done, because it yields imagery that can so easily seem trite and lacking in human warmth, putting itself directly on a collision course with those that fear mechanization of art. How does one make art that springs from the cold soul of the motherboard and yet carries the caress of a human hand and heart? Integrative Digital Art The answer to this challenge comes in another of the computer's innate abilities, that being the ability, by the reduction of all sorts of input into a homogeneous data flow, to integrate and synthesize widely divergent material into a single work In other words, not just paint or photo or fractal, but a fluid synthesis of all sorts and kinds of media, materials, processes and styles. This "Integrative Digital Art" yields some highly personal and varied approaches to how the art is made, as well as, how it looks. It brings into play all the imaging sources, drawing tools, automated filters, traditional and digital processes that one can summon. It explodes and expands "multi-media" by being, virtually, every media. There are many strong examples of this in the MOCA collection by artists such as, Hans Deiter Grossmann , Afanassy Pud , John Clive , Kent Oberheu , Kolja Tatic , Ileana Frometa Grillo , and Orna Ben-Shoshan . You may notice that none of these artist's works looks like the next. There is, therefore, no discernible emergent style. So, if we are about playing the same, age old game of stylistic innovation visa vi the established world of "Fine Art"; even this genre of digital art has reason for being marginalized by "the big show". THE TYRANNY OF NEWNESS No artist sets out to create a style. Often one is directed by technique or philosophy or a new tool to innovate, but the recognition of a style has more to do with the critics, galleries and academicians that struggle to ascribe words, labels, context and a re-sale price, after the fact, to the artist's work. All well and good, until the drive to innovate new styles becomes a major criterion for evaluating the relative worth of any particular work of art. Or, until a whole art form is proclaimed "dead" by virtue of apparent inability to adequately perform on the stage of stylistic innovation. Then, we must question if, rather than the art being dead, perhaps it is the person looking at the art that has succumb. With styles being the actual purview of the critic, we might proclaim it is the critic and not the artist that has failed to create something new. In truth, we may not be able to adequately address the question, "what's new", in two dimensional inanimate art simply by employing digital tools. Today, looking at the range of such art, all of which can be pigeon-holed neatly into this "ism" or that, regardless of the tools employed; we may have to consider that, in a broad sense, things have run their course stylistically. Which is to say that the "stylemakers", the critics, galleries and academicians, have created a sufficient number of broadly defined styles as to fit all occasions and visual statements. So that one can, with a good degree of jaded safety, say, "I've seen that, we've been there." Consider that art commentary and marketing based on stylistic trends has died. Perhaps we have entered an era where art commentary must become as nuanced and as sensitive to individual perception as the artists themselves. Art is no longer a matter of this style or that style. It is a thick, murky, strong brew of people and tools and diverse expression. Style has become just another tool of that expression and since art is not about the tools used to make it, art criticism can no longer be an evaluation based on style or genre. Instead of a dead-end, I see a great "jumping-off-point" wherein the strength and worth of a visual statement can be evaluated based on one's skill to manipulate line, composition, color, form, rhythm...plus an artist�s sensitivity in selecting and manipulating a visual style along with the other tools used to create a particular work of Art. In his book, "The Art Spirit" Robert Henri states, "...there is the new movement. There always has been the new movement and there always will be the new movement.. It is necessary to pierce to the core to get at the value of a movement and not be confused by its sensational exterior." In the case of visual digital art, a good indication as to the nature of this core comes by way of recent developments in music; another "digital art". Everyone is quite aware of how digital tools have revolutionized the making and distribution of popular music. There is an explosion of new music created and distributed by individuals utilizing smaller, more powerful and more affordable digital studios and tools. Driven by creativity and artistic desire without requiring "big money", mass approval and massive retun on investment, this whole movement has the "music industry" ( a close facsimile of the "Fine Arts" industrial complex) quaking in their Gucci's. In a recent NPR report, Roger Linn, inventor of digital drum pads and a session guitarist, foresees the day when "there'll be fewer professional musicians, but more people making music." In the same report, Chicago recording engineer, Steve Albini names this phenomenon "the triumph of the amateur" and notes the same trends one can observe in the visual digital arts. According to Albini this triumph of the amateur, "has led, aesthetically, to a lot of poor sounding recordings as musicians experiment with equipment without basic knowledge of audio recording. But, culturally, it has been democratizing, empowering and valuable." In terms of the craft of visual art, rules have been broken and often these new artists appear to know much more about software than art. But, the genie is out of the box and expanding creative bandwidth will always win out over perserving outmoded traditions and dogma. Don Archer, creator and chief curator for the MOCA website, sees strong evidence that the kind of digital art we see here is the most popular and widely practiced art making of all time. "Digital art needs no defense. It's here, it's pervasive, it's succeeded in encouraging digital artists by the tens of thousands all over the world. It is the most popular art form ever. It should be taken for granted. It does not need the imprimatur of fine art critics, which will come anyway." THE ROAD AHEAD: A Futurist's View That we find very little of the two dimensional visual digital art that I have been focused on here in this essay in the established fine arts galleries and magazines is strongly indicative of where the truly vast market and validation for this work lies. It is "out there" in that much larger world which has, for so long, been disenfranchised. Ahead lies an even more far reaching period of democratization and the advancement of new markets, modes of display and distribution that will certainly revolutionize all aspects of what we now call "art". Style will become a tool for expression, not opression. Art will become, simultaneously more personal and more pervasive. In this essay I have limited my comments to specific "styles" of one particular art form, this is not to say that digital tools will not lay the basis for, as of yet, unimagined new "art forms". As we more fully realize the consequences of a media which can integrate widely different input into a unifying form of binary expression and translate that expression into a myriad of perceived forms, we will arrive at a whole new terrain for, not only art, but how we perceive and experience our own consciousness. We will have "symbiotic art", capable of expressing color as sound and motion as music. The observer will become a functionary of the art itself and the designer will become a poet of the senses. With this will come the awareness that we already live in a virtual world transmitted to us by our evolved senses that, after all, only give us a single version of what remains, without us to observe it, a basically undifferentiated universe of electromagnetic waves, particles and constant energetic motion and change. JD Jarvis November, 2002 Las Cruces, NM JD Jarvis website

REVIEW article

Art therapy in the digital world: an integrative review of current practice and future directions.

• 1 Institute of Health Research and Innovation, University of the Highlands and Islands, Inverness, United Kingdom
• 2 Independent Researcher, Moray, United Kingdom
• 3 Population Health Science Institute, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
• 4 Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

Background: Psychotherapy interventions increasingly utilize digital technologies to improve access to therapy and its acceptability. Opportunities that digital technology potentially creates for art therapy reach beyond increased access to include new possibilities of adaptation and extension of therapy tool box. Given growing interest in practice and research in this area, it is important to investigate how art therapists engage with digital technology or how (and whether) practice might be safely adapted to include new potential modes of delivery and new arts media.

Methods: An integrative review of peer-reviewed literature on the use of digital technology in art therapy was conducted. The methodology used is particularly well suited for early stage exploratory inquiries, allowing for close examination of papers from a variety of methodological paradigms. Only studies that presented empirical outcomes were included in the formal analysis.

Findings: Over 400 records were screened and 12 studies were included in the synthesis, pertaining to both the use of digital technology for remote delivery and as a medium for art making. Included studies, adopting predominantly qualitative and mixed methods, are grouped according to their focus on: art therapists’ views and experiences, online/distance art therapy, and the use of digital arts media. Recurring themes are discussed, including potential benefits and risks of incorporating digital technology in sessions with clients, concerns relating to ethics, resistance toward digital arts media, technological limitations and implications for therapeutic relationship and therapy process. Propositions for best practice and technological innovations that could make some of the challenges redundant are also reviewed. Future directions in research are indicated and cautious openness is recommended in both research and practice.

Conclusion: The review documents growing research illustrating increased use of digital technology by art therapists for both online delivery and digital art making. Potentially immense opportunities that technology brings for art therapy should be considered alongside limitations and challenges of clinical, pragmatic and ethical nature. The review aims to invite conversations and further research to explore ways in which technology could increase relevance and reach of art therapy without compromising clients’ safety and key principles of the profession.

Introduction

Digital technology is increasingly present in psychotherapy practice worldwide, enabling clients and therapists to connect remotely. This way of improving access to therapy is important for those who might not otherwise be able to benefit from treatment due to living in more remote locations or having disabilities or mobility problems preventing them to attend therapy sessions in person. Despite this general trend of expansion in telehealth provision, to include also psychotherapy services, relatively little is known about its use within art therapy practice ( Choe, 2014 ; Levy et al., 2018 ). Research in the area focuses primarily on verbal therapies and more specifically on cognitive-behavioral therapy conducted online ( Hedman et al., 2012 ; Saddichha et al., 2014 ; Vigerland et al., 2016 ) with some notable examples of work highlighting issues key to psychodynamic psychotherapy ( De Bitencourt Machado et al., 2016 ; Feijó et al., 2018 ).

Art therapists support clients in engaging in creative processes to improve their psychological wellbeing. Due to incorporating art making within therapy process and the key role of triangular therapeutic relationship between the therapist, the client and the artwork ( Schaverien, 2000 ; Gussak and Rosal, 2016 ), art therapy practice is arguably more difficult to translate to online situations. However, suggestions have also been made that art therapy is particularly well suited to distance delivery, partially due to increasing ease of sharing images via online channels and non-reliance on verbal communication, and also due to dealing with symbols, metaphors and projections, which can manifest irrespective of medium used ( McNiff, 1999 ; Austin, 2009 ).

Art therapy profession has not entered the digital world only recently. In fact, it has been critically engaged in often difficult discussions on the risks and potential of digital technology for art therapy practice for over three decades ( Weinberg, 1985 ; Canter, 1987 , 1989 ; Johnson, 1987 ). Back in 1999 the Art Therapy Journal dedicated a special issue to the links between computer technology and art therapy and has repeated a similar issue a decade later. In 2019, the Journal asked therapists and researchers to consider ways in which professional assumptions can be updated, modernized or reframed to meet contemporary needs.

The use of digital technology in art therapy is not limited to online communication tools but extends to the application of digital media for the purpose of art making, equally relevant to face-to-face practice. While distance art therapy could potentially widen the reach of therapy to include new groups of clients, expanding the range of therapeutic tools to include digital arts media might extend art therapy toolbox to widen access for those clients who might not otherwise engage in traditional art materials for a variety of reasons.

However, it has been argued that the process of digital media adoption in art therapy is slow ( Carlton, 2014 ; Choe, 2014 ) and resistance to digital technology as well as concerns about the use of digital tools for art making in therapy have been reported in literature ( Kuleba, 2008 ; Klorer, 2009 ; Potash, 2009 ). It has been even implied that art therapists themselves may be more conservative and hesitant in their use of digital media than their clients ( McNiff, 1999 ; Peterson et al., 2005 ; Carlton, 2014 ). This cautiousness is stipulated to be informed by a heightened sense of responsibility for clients’ safety and wellbeing ( Orr, 2016 ). Art therapists’ own emotional factors and biases were cited to be important barriers to adoption of technology ( Asawa, 2009 ) while it has been suggested that therapists experience “conflict between the desire to promote art therapy and engage in technology and the desire to remain loyal to the field’s origins in traditional methods of communication and art media” ( Asawa, 2009 , p. 58).

The use of digital arts media is unique to art therapy practice and is perhaps not yet sufficiently researched for that reason, despite its potentially enormous implications for art therapy practice ( Kapitan, 2009 ). Lack of in-depth research on digital art making has been cited as a key barrier for practitioners to introduce digital arts media in therapy sessions ( Klorer, 2009 ; Potash, 2009 ). Similarly, limited guidelines from professional associations and importance of more specific technology-oriented ethical codes for practitioners are frequently highlighted ( Kuleba, 2008 ; Asawa, 2009 ; Alders et al., 2011 ; Evans, 2012 ).

A challenge identified in early stages of discussion on the use of technology in art therapy was the need for increased collaboration between art therapists, designers and developers in order to device technological solutions suitable to art therapy practice ( Gussak and Nyce, 1999 ). Limited attempts to develop art therapy-specific electronic devices to date lacked in-depth input from art therapists at the technical stage and, in consequence, appropriate integration of the established processes of art therapy with technology (e.g., Mihailidis et al., 2010 ; Mattson, 2015 ). In effect, art therapists who incorporate digital arts media in their practice elect to use painting apps not necessarily suitable for art therapy practice. There is also an ongoing debate on the tactile nature of art materials being lost if art is made using digital tools and potential impact on clients ( Kuleba, 2008 ; Garner, 2017 ). A similar discussion concerns the therapeutic relationship and specifically whether it could be recreated in distance therapy ( Klorer, 2009 ; Potash, 2009 ).

Despite these indicated debates on the usefulness of digital technology for art therapy practice and polarized opinions, some scholars and practitioners have advocated for increased efforts to incorporate digital art-making in the therapy process suggesting rising and permanent role of technology in art therapy ( McNiff, 2000 ; Kapitan, 2007 ; Thong, 2007 ). Given the rapidly growing interest in digital technology applications to art therapy practice, research has been developing relatively slowly and has not yet been systematized. Doing so would help paint an inevitably complex picture of how art therapy is currently engaging with digital technology and how it might make the best use of the opportunities it presents and critically address challenges early in the process.

In order to identify key topics important for practitioners and areas for further research, we aimed to capture and synthesize available research literature that explores the role of digital technology in the current and future art therapy practice (understood here as within-session work with clients). More specific research questions were:

- How do art therapists use digital technology in their practice?

- What benefits and challenges of using digital technology with clients do they identify?

- How do clients experience art therapy sessions with digital technology elements?

Methodology

Through our own experiences in research and practice and following some initial literature searches we were aware that the area we set to explore is complex and relatively novel. Thus, we anticipated that any published research accounts were likely to include a variety of study designs, appropriately to the overall exploratory character of research in the area and in line with research in arts therapies in general, which tends to draw upon diverse methodologies and beyond qualitative and quantitative paradigms, to include also arts-based approaches. We chose an integrative review framework as a guide to allow us to undertake a well-rounded but flexible evidence synthesis that would present a breadth of perspectives and combine methodologies without overvaluing specific hierarchies of evidence ( Whittemore and Knafl, 2005 ). Integrative review is an appropriate method at early stages of systematizing knowledge on a developing subject area ( Russell, 2005 ; Souza et al., 2010 ) and as such was deemed suitable for our exploratory work which aimed to identify central issues in the area, indicate the state of the scientific evidence across diverse methodological paradigms and identify gaps in current research ( Russell, 2005 ).

Search Strategy

The following databases were searched for studies published until July 2020: MEDLINE, CINAHL Complete, APA PsycInfo, APA PsycArticles, Academic Search Complete and the Cochrane Library. Google Scholar search, backward and forward reference screening of included publications, and peer consultation were used to identify any other relevant articles. Search string ( Table 1 ) included the four key elements of this review: intervention (art therapy), intervention modification/adaptation (digital technology), methodology (empirical research) and population of interest (all client populations, any setting). These elements of a search strategy were conceptually guided by the PEO (Population-Exposure-Outcome) framework ( Khan et al., 2011 ; Bettany-Saltikov, 2016 ) instead of the more popular PICO (Population-Intervention-Comparison-Outcome), as the former was considered more suitable for capturing mixed method studies ( Methley et al., 2014 ).

Table 1. Search string development: concepts shaping this review and corresponding PEO elements.

Inclusion/Exclusion Criteria

We opted for broad inclusion criteria to report on all research studies pertaining to the use of digital technology in art therapy and therefore no specific definition of ‘digital’ was adopted other than how authors describe the focus of their paper(s). Time of publication was not initially considered a selection criterion but on reviewing the papers a decision was made to exclude those that focused on technology no longer relevant to modern practice, which, it was felt, related to articles published before 1999.

Articles were included in the review if they:

- concerned the use of modern (currently relevant) digital technology (DT) in within-session art therapy practice with clients;

- reported outcomes observed through empirical study, regardless of whether these were investigated using quantitative, qualitative, mixed or arts-based methods;

- were available online and in English.

Articles were excluded if they:

- focused exclusively on the use of digital technology for office work, assessment, supervision, training or research;

- were PhD theses, dissertations or books/book chapters;

- were theoretical/opinion papers with no empirical data reported.

Data Extraction

Data were extracted from included papers using a data collection form based on the Template for Intervention Description and Replication (TIDieR; Hoffmann et al., 2014 ) which helped to record the characteristics of the studies, interventions, outcomes and main findings reported.

Data Synthesis

We followed the recommended process for synthesizing data in an integrative review ( Whittemore and Knafl, 2005 ) by initially comparing the extracted data item by item, recognizing similarities and groupings, to eventually identifying meaningful categories for studies and interventions included in the review. Each of the papers was read multiple times to generate a mental map of ideas explored across the literature. Iterative process of examining the classified data enabled us to identify themes and relationships which constitute the essence of this synthesis process. Due to expectedly heterogenic character of included studies, attempts at establishing a meaningful classification were at all times guided by the above principles.

Of 474 records identified through database searching and consulting reference lists, 405 were excluded based on title and abstract screening. Full-texts for the remaining 69 records were consulted and 56 were excluded with reasons ( Figure 1 ). Many of the excluded papers were opinion pieces which did not present empirical outcomes, but were nevertheless helpful in gaining a fuller perspective of the topic and are frequently referred to in the discussion. Selection process resulted in 13 articles included in this review.

Figure 1. PRISMA flow diagram.

Study Characteristics

All of included research was undertaken either in the US (9 studies) or in Canada (4 studies). The studies were varied methodologically, with qualitative (6 studies), quantitative (1 study) and mixed methods (5 studies) paradigms all represented. The studies employed primarily surveys, focus groups, interviews, case studies and prototyping workshops, often following participatory and mixed-method designs, which seems appropriate for early explorations and for highly applied research with direct implications for clinical practice. Art therapists themselves were research participants in the majority of included papers with only three reporting specifically on client experiences ( Darewych et al., 2015 ; Levy et al., 2018 ; Spooner et al., 2019 ). Numbers of participants in qualitative, client-focused and/or workshop-based studies (8 studies) were generally low (ranging from single figures to 25 participants) and numbers of respondents in survey-based studies (4 studies) ranged from 45 to 195. Two papers ( Collie and Čubranić, 1999 , 2002 ) reported on the same research study and are referred to jointly throughout this review (including in tables).

The articles tended to discuss the use of digital technology in art therapy practice in a more general way or focus on one of the two uses of digital technology identified in our initial literature review: the use of online tools for distance art therapy and the use of digital media for art making within therapy sessions. Majority of the survey-based studies which examined directly arts therapists’ opinions on the use of digital technology in art therapy were interested in both uses of technology, while workshop-based studies typically focused on either distance delivery or exploration of digital media for art making. There were overlaps and we tried to capture the relationship between the digital technology interest and the categories we eventually decided to group the articles into in Figure 2 , which also provides an overview of methodologies and participant groups. The results are presented below in three seemingly separate groups of studies. However, the concepts explored in this research are inevitably intertwined, which is important to note to avoid over-simplifying the nature of opportunities and challenges brought into art therapy realm by the progressing developments in digital technology. Paragraphs below present key messages from the papers grouped in the three categories, except findings pertaining directly to the challenges and benefits of using digital technology within therapy, which will be discussed separately.

Figure 2. Selected characteristics of included studies: online/face-to-face delivery, digital/traditional arts media, methodology, participant group. *Indicates that a characteristic is present in a study.

General Views on Technology, Online Art Therapy, and Digital Arts Media

Art therapists’ views and opinions.

Four articles from two US-based research teams focused entirely on the views and opinions of art therapists on the use of digital technology in art therapy practice and utilized a survey design ( Table 2 : Peterson et al., 2005 ; Orr, 2006 , 2012 ; Peterson, 2010 ). They gathered both the therapists’ experience (based on practice) and expectations (based on personal attitudes). A total number of responses for the four included papers was 474, with majority coming from qualified art therapists and students in art therapy training (in one survey, only 61.5% of respondents were qualified art therapists with the other respondents being not practizing attendees of the AAT conference, Peterson et al., 2005 ). In one study, follow-up interviews were also undertaken with eight respondents selected according to their readiness for adopting new technologies ( Peterson, 2010 ).

Table 2. Characteristics of studies focusing on art therapists’ views and experiences.

Although all studies reported also on the general adoption of technology by art therapists in personal and professional practice including office work, research and training, this review extracted findings pertaining to in-session practice with clients as far as it was possible or to any aspects of digital technology use that directly affect work with clients. Therefore, information on other uses of technology by art therapists, although reported in the cited papers, is not presented here. The general message coming from all included surveys was that art therapists tended to use technology far more often for their own personal practice and for administrative professional tasks than within sessions with clients.

Across the studies, a trend emerged suggesting an increasing use of digital technology within art therapy sessions. A study comparing results from surveys undertaken 7 years apart, found that between 2004 and 2011 art therapists increased their use of digital media in their art therapy practice with clients: from 19 to 32% using technology as an artmaking tool during sessions and from 2.4 to 9.4% using web camera communication during sessions ( Orr, 2006 , 2012 ). In addition, in the 2011 survey, 11.8% respondents reported using online chat ( Orr, 2012 ). In an even earlier survey from 2002 ( Peterson et al., 2005 ), 12.3% respondents reported using technology with clients for creating digital artwork and 1.5% reported using web camera for communication in sessions, confirming the rise in in-session technology use over the years.

Two studies highlighted the need for specialist training in digital technology use for art therapists. Orr (2006) reported that in her 2004 survey only 28.5% respondents received some training in using technology to create art, 4.8% respondents felt that the training received met their needs well, while none felt that it met their needs very well. In 2011, the percentage of therapists who reported receiving training in the use of technology as therapeutic tool with clients increased slightly and stood at 36.5% and 11.5% of respondents felt that it has met their needs well ( Orr, 2012 ). Despite this rise in training opportunities, the author concluded that the training “has not kept up with the adoption rate of technology by art therapists” ( Orr, 2012 , p. 234) and that more and better education is indeed needed.

Another survey conducted almost a decade ago moved beyond establishing how art therapists use digital technology to determine their reasons for adopting or rejecting emerging digital tools for therapeutic use with their clients ( Peterson, 2010 ). A client’s response to a form of digital technology was found to be a key factor in art therapists’ decision as to whether the technology was an effective therapeutic medium. The respondents agreed that if a medium (including digital media) could safely contribute to a desirable change, then its inclusion in treatment is warranted. Cost was, again, cited as an adoption deterrent, while providing new capabilities for the therapist and the client was an additional adoption factor.

A theme consistent across the presented surveys seems to be the highly ethical and professional approach of art therapists in deciding on the use of technology with clients. The responses seemed consistent in indicating that a degree of familiarity with digital medium is necessary for therapists to implement it in therapy session with clients. Importantly, the clients’ response to any novel arts medium is the guiding factor in making decision about a specific technology adoption. Being certain of the benefits for clients seems to be a prerequisite for introducing a specific technology in art therapy sessions. The survey from 2011 revealed that art therapists were increasingly more concerned about ethical and confidentiality issues than 7 years before and that their main reservations about using digital media were linked with uncertainties around ethics ( Orr, 2006 , 2012 ).

Online Art Therapy: Digital Technology Used for Distance Art Therapy Sessions

We identified five research studies (of which one was reported in two articles) that were concerned primarily with application of digital technology solutions to remote art therapy delivery ( Table 3 : Collie and Čubranić, 1999 , 2002 ; Collie et al., 2006 , 2017 ; Levy et al., 2018 ; Spooner et al., 2019 ). Three of these studies, all from the same Canadian research team, similarly to research discussed above, examined art therapists’ opinions through focus groups ( Collie et al., 2006 ), interviews and participatory designs, including simulated online art therapy interventions ( Collie and Čubranić, 1999 , 2002 ; Collie et al., 2017 ). The studies were concerned with development of an online art therapy service for people with limited mobility, women with breast cancer and, most recently, young adult cancer patients. Two other studies from one US-based research team examined the experience of veterans participating in a blended (primarily online, with face-to-face initial assessment and re-evaluation) creative arts therapies program via semi-structured interviews and a single case study of an art therapy participant ( Levy et al., 2018 ; Spooner et al., 2019 ). Both studies were undertaken as part of a clinical program evaluation and therefore did not follow a fully experimental design. Although pre-post assessments were undertaken, these have not been reported yet.

Table 3. Characteristics of studies focusing on online / distance art therapy.

In two studies ( Collie and Čubranić, 2002 ; Collie et al., 2017 ) the participants were also co-researchers, described as art therapists, counselors, educators and people with experience of life-threatening illness (total n = 17), who were invited to take part in simulated online art therapy group sessions. The interventions experienced in the two studies were quite different, one being a group art therapy session in which participants communicated and shared digital images created in real time ( Collie and Čubranić, 2002 ), while the other included both synchronous and asynchronous elements, allowing participants to take part in live chat-based session and also upload images to a discussion board outside of scheduled session times ( Collie et al., 2017 ). In both studies participants shared their experience via discussions and follow-up interviews. Another study ( Collie et al., 2006 ) used focus groups and interviews with similarly diverse participants ( n = 25) to generate clinical and technological guidelines for distance art therapy.

One of the key conclusions coming from the studies was that online group art therapy, being a relatively novel intervention, would require certain adaptations in relation to face-to-face practice ( Spooner et al., 2019 ), for example development of suitable “social protocols” ( Collie and Čubranić, 1999 ), refining of communication procedures ( Collie and Čubranić, 2002 ) and development of “new therapeutic models” ( Collie et al., 2006 ). These adaptations would need to comply with the legal and ethical guidelines, with new telehealth-related guidance eventually required for art therapy profession and initially adapted from related disciplines such as counseling or psychology ( Spooner et al., 2019 ).

Among participating health professionals (including a large proportion of art therapists), there seemed to be quite polarized opinions about the use of computers in therapy, with majority in favor of distance art therapy, but some participants also expressing concerns about “antitherapeutic” character of technology ( Collie et al., 2006 ). Distance delivery was not generally viewed as allowing anonymous participation – in fact, high value was put on close personal interaction regardless of communication technology used ( Collie et al., 2006 ). A sense of connection and “togetherness” was observed in a study of an online group art therapy ( Collie et al., 2017 ), suggesting that the usual therapeutic group factors may be transferable in a distance therapy setup.

In their evaluation of a US-based creative arts therapy program for veterans living in rural areas, Levy et al. (2018) reported primarily positive experiences of using an online art therapy service. Participants appreciated the delivery mode and not having to travel long distances to sessions and described the normally expected positive effects of therapy like increased confidence, improved communication and making sense of emotions through self-expression. A case study of a female veteran participating in the program ( Spooner et al., 2019 ) initially revealed a decrease in perceived quality of life and satisfaction with health, which was attributed by her and her therapist to the actual progress in therapy being made: becoming more aware of emotions and ready to explore more difficult topics to eventually rediscover aspects of herself that were previously lost. These accounts seem to confirm that the therapeutic process can manifest within distance art therapy sessions and therapeutic outcomes can be achieved.

Two papers, published almost two decades apart ( Collie and Čubranić, 1999 ; Levy et al., 2018 ), proposed that distance art therapy creates subtle shifts within the usual triangular relationship between the client, the therapist and the artwork ( Schaverien, 2000 ). It was suggested that the client/artwork relationship is emphasized, while the client and the therapist are geographically separated and the client remains particularly connected and “co-present” with the art. This could create new opportunities for therapy and mean that the physical separation between the client and the therapist might affect art therapy less than verbal forms of therapy.

Digital Arts Media: Digital Technology Used for Making Artwork in Art Therapy Sessions

Three articles focused primarily on the use of digital media within face-to-face therapy settings ( Table 4 : Choe, 2014 ; Darewych et al., 2015 ; Kaimal et al., 2016 ), but it needs to be noted that the technologies discussed can potentially be successfully applied in distance therapy situations. Two papers examined applicability of iPads and/or other touchscreen devices to art therapy. One study reported on the experiences of adults with developmental disabilities through phenomenological approach ( Darewych et al., 2015 ), while the other set to explore some unique potentially therapeutic features of art applications for iPads from art therapists’ perspective, utilizing the methods of a survey and focus groups ( Choe, 2014 ). The third and most recent study focused on the relevance of virtual reality art-making tools ( Kaimal et al., 2016 ). This small selection of papers nevertheless provides a good overview of the current application of digital media to making art in art therapy sessions and introduces a client perspective.

Table 4. Characteristics of studies focusing on digital arts media use in art therapy.

In her investigation on iPads’ applicability to art therapy, Choe (2014) defined three qualities of art apps most valued by art therapists: ease of use or intuitiveness, simplicity, and responsiveness. The therapists who took part in the study believed that it was essential that any art apps were matched with the needs of individual clients and that no single app examined in this project could satisfy the needs of all clients and art therapists. The study found that the therapists had higher expectations of digital than of traditional art materials and were not prepared to compromise on the app’s speed, control or immediacy of working with images. It was suggested that certain client populations may in particular benefit from digital art making in therapy, including, among others, clients with developmental disorders, clients with suppressed immune systems (due to iPads being easier to clean), and clients who have experienced tactile trauma. It was also proposed that digital art making posed risks to some client groups, including those with internet addiction, psychosis or obsessive-compulsive disorder ( Choe, 2014 ). Another study similarly recommended caution about using immersive VR-based tools for art making with clients managing acute psychiatric symptoms ( Kaimal et al., 2020 ).

A study examining the experiences of eight adults with developmental disabilities who used digital art making in art therapy sessions ( Darewych et al., 2015 ), concluded that the participants appreciated the ease of use of the apps tested, which allowed them to create images independently. Those with olfactory and tactile sensitivity preferred the texture-free touchscreen devices to traditional art materials.

Making art in virtual reality, as “a new medium that challenges the traditional laws of the physical world and materials” ( Kaimal et al., 2020 , p. 17), was also tried and tested for use in art therapy in a small experiential study. The authors propose that therapeutic change can occur in VR environments and that it relates primarily to the unique qualities of the medium and to the fact that the participant is exposed to new environments of choice and creative opportunities not available in the material world ( Kaimal et al., 2020 ).

Challenges and Opportunities of Using Digital Technology in Art Therapy Practice

The following section presents findings across the three sets of studies that pertain more specifically to the challenges and opportunities of the use of digital technology in art therapy practice. Although these are grouped into three categories, not dissimilar to the categories of studies presented above, findings are based on contributions from across all papers examined in this review. We found frequent overlaps in aspects of technology discussed within papers, for example it was common for studies generally focusing on digital media to provide insights on remote delivery and vice versa. Not wanting to lose those, we decided to thematically analyze the content of all 13 included articles to identify themes relating to the advantages and disadvantages of technology use in art therapy, pertaining in particular to digital media and technologies and processes enabling remote delivery.

General Concerns About Including Digital Technology in Art Therapy Practice

Cost of equipment.

High cost of equipment was cited as the main reason for not including technology in art therapy sessions in a survey from 2004 ( Orr, 2006 ) and from 2002 ( Peterson et al., 2005 ), particularly the cost of electronic art tools advanced enough to allow for true emotional expression ( Orr, 2006 ). However, this issue was not as prominent in a survey from 2011, when it seemed that ethical concerns of art therapists were predominant barriers to introducing technology in therapy sessions ( Orr, 2012 ).

The importance of a specialist training for art therapists in the use of digital technology is highlighted across studies ( Collie et al., 2006 ; Orr, 2006 , 2012 ; Kaimal et al., 2020 ). It is recognized that skilful and active facilitation, essential for providing appropriate container (safe environment) and ensuring client safety ( Collie et al., 2017 ; Kaimal et al., 2020 ), requires extra time for learning ( Orr, 2006 ). Similarly, more effort and time investment in training might be needed on the client’s side, either to adjust to an online mode of therapy ( Spooner et al., 2019 ) or to a new type of digital arts media ( Kaimal et al., 2020 ). A concern has been raised about this additional learning potentially impeding the therapeutic process and that extra time might be needed for establishing a therapeutic relationship ( Collie et al., 2006 ).

Technical issues

Unfamiliarity and not being comfortable with the devices were cited as key barriers to engaging technology in art therapy sessions ( Peterson et al., 2005 ; Orr, 2006 ), which could present a challenge for both the therapist and the client ( Spooner et al., 2019 ). Problems with connectivity, including not having sufficient strength of signal and reliability, were cited as common issues in studies that examined online art therapy ( Levy et al., 2018 ; Spooner et al., 2019 ). Both inexperience and technical breakdowns could cause distress to clients ( Collie et al., 2006 , 2017 ).

Concerns Related to Online Art Therapy

Confidentiality and safety.

Concerns about maintaining confidentiality and privacy in art therapy sessions in which online technology is introduced were raised across the studies ( Orr, 2012 ; Collie et al., 2017 ; Levy et al., 2018 ). It was suggested that conducting a session online does not allow for the same assurance of privacy as in a suitable therapy room, due to potential for interruptions from family or housemates ( Levy et al., 2018 ), and that creating a safe emotional container in a cyberspace is harder than in face-to-face therapy ( Collie et al., 2017 ). In addition to confidentiality and safety issues, other ethical concerns have been raised, for example that technology can be used by clients for inappropriate online interactions ( Orr, 2012 ), that the comfort of home environment in case of online sessions might lead clients to behave in ways that they would not in a therapist’s office or that the therapist might potentially observe something concerning or illegal in clients’ private home space ( Levy et al., 2018 ).

Technological limitations

A study on online art therapy for veterans highlighted some limitations encountered in how artwork was shared between the client and the therapist, including therapists being unable to view the client’s drawing process as well as their facial expression ( Levy et al., 2018 ). When artworks were made using traditional art media and shown to the webcam, the quality of the image was at times compromised, leading to blur or loss in subtle detail ( Levy et al., 2018 ). Observing art making process directly seemed desirable while not easily achievable in online therapy setting. Levy et al. (2018) also highlighted the importance of the chronological order in which elements are added to the drawing and expressed concern about the therapist not knowing the content of the image until it is completed. In a survey from 2004 a doubt was raised as to whether it would at all be possible for an art therapist to conduct a session without being able to observe art making process in real time ( Collie et al., 2006 ).

Benefits of Online Art Therapy

Bridging divides/connecting.

Research on online art therapy seems to confirm that online mode of delivery has the potential to bridge geographical distances ( Collie and Čubranić, 1999 ; Collie et al., 2017 ) and expand access to services otherwise unavailable to clients living in rural and more remote areas ( Collie and Čubranić, 2002 ; Levy et al., 2018 ). It also helps make art therapy more accessible to clients regardless of barriers such as stigma or disability ( Spooner et al., 2019 ), and especially mobility disabilities ( Peterson, 2010 ). It was also observed that technology might have an equalizing effect in a group therapy setting if it is new to everyone ( Collie et al., 2017 ) and that the semi-anonymity of an online group might in fact increase a sense of privacy, particularly for those who are worried about being judged by appearance ( Collie and Čubranić, 1999 ; Collie et al., 2017 ). Technologies that enable collaborating on a single artwork from different locations or even looking at each other’s art on the screen were reported to bring a sense of connection and emotional closeness, as if being in the same place ( Collie et al., 2006 , 2017 ). It was also felt by some that distance delivery promotes community involvement, integration and social engagement by, for example, allowing incorporation of family members into the treatment plan ( Levy et al., 2018 ; Spooner et al., 2019 ).

Therapeutic rapport

Some studies found a positive impact of online mode of art therapy on developing therapeutic rapport ( Orr, 2012 ; Levy et al., 2018 ; Spooner et al., 2019 ). The use of technology in therapy was seen by some as comforting and actually helpful in reducing client’s resistance to therapy and/or art making ( Orr, 2012 ). Considering the client’s home environment by the therapist was referred to as an opportunity to establish deeper trust ( Levy et al., 2018 ) and a case study of a female veteran confirmed that her progress was greatly facilitated by the opportunity to invite the art therapist into her home ( Spooner et al., 2019 ).

Some papers suggested that using technology for distance therapy can be empowering ( Orr, 2012 ), allowing the client to take a more active role in their own treatment process and to have a greater autonomy within and outside therapy sessions ( Levy et al., 2018 ; Spooner et al., 2019 ). There were also indications that creating art in a home setting might lead to increased engagement in arts processes on a more regular basis and between therapy sessions ( Levy et al., 2018 ; Spooner et al., 2019 ).

Best Practice Recommendations for Online Art Therapy

Two papers in particular ( Collie et al., 2006 ; Levy et al., 2018 ) attempted to suggest solutions to some of the challenges mentioned above and ways of working which might increase safety and efficacy of online AT practice.

Among the recommendations developed by Collie and her team for distance art groups for women with cancer some seemed potentially applicable to all online art therapy situations ( Collie et al., 2006 ). These included: using a mix of technologies and accommodating clients’ individual preferences, clearly explaining limits to confidentiality imposed by Internet communication, providing guidance to participants for creating suitable private spaces, ensuring that participants have access to immediate local support as an alternative method of addressing emotional safety, and ensuring the safety and confidentiality of art sent from one place to another. The need for training for practitioners in offering art therapy from a distance was also highlighted ( Collie et al., 2006 ). Similar message was repeated in a more recent study, which concluded that the importance of skilful and typically more active than face-to-face facilitation of an online art therapy group calls for specialized training ( Collie et al., 2017 ).

Levy et al. (2018) proposed that in order to address potential technical issues with connectivity, therapists might offer their clients more than one way to connect and agree alternative ways of contact (e.g., by telephone) in case the connection breaks mid-session, to be able to continue any unfinished discussions and/or obtain closure before the end of the session. It was also suggested that interruptions from family could be minimized if the therapist and the client agree in advance how these would be handled, e.g., client could alert therapist when others are present. Instructing clients to be prepared for the session and to call exactly at appointed times was also proposed best practice. To address issues with blurred or unclear image while showing artwork to the webcam, it was recommended that, in case of digital artwork, client might share their screen, and in case of art made with traditional arts media, a digital photograph might be taken and shared with the therapist. Establishing a common vocabulary for describing artwork was another suggestion for improving communication.

Concerns Related to Digital Arts Media

Lack of tactile qualities.

An opinion that technology is cold, isolating, and even “dehumanizing” is repeated particularly in the literature published in the previous decade ( Collie et al., 2006 ; Orr, 2006 ). These seem to refer primarily to the nonsensory character of digital arts media ( Orr, 2006 ), the lack of tactile and sensual qualities ( Collie et al., 2006 ; Orr, 2012 ; Choe, 2014 ) or even lack of tangible physical engagement with the medium as in case of making art in virtual reality ( Kaimal et al., 2020 ). It was suggested that this lack of sensory input might lead to clients disconnecting not only from art materials, but also from their own bodies and social interactions ( Orr, 2012 ) and that the therapeutic value of working with “traditional” tactile art materials should not be underestimated ( Collie et al., 2006 ; Orr, 2006 ). Technology was also cited as potentially overwhelming and distracting from the creative process ( Orr, 2012 ).

Limited room for expression

An observation was made in a paper published over two decades ago that the small size of a computer screen and small mouse movements, used at that time to create images on-screen, could “tame emotions” ( Collie and Čubranić, 1999 ). Similar concern that the standardization of digital tools for art making could impede emotional or creative expression was voiced in forthcoming publications ( Collie et al., 2006 ; Orr, 2012 ). It was also speculated that a computer image, that exists as multiple copies of itself, might not be an adequate container for emotional material ( Collie and Čubranić, 1999 ) and that using computers for art making might put more emphasis on the product than on the artistic process ( Collie et al., 2006 ). The VR software used for art making was also described as “somewhat crude and clunky” ( Kaimal et al., 2020 , p. 22), potentially disorienting and incomparable with traditional arts materials in terms of the range of visual effects possible.

Benefits of Digital Arts Media

Freedom of expression.

It was suggested across a number of papers that digital arts media can be empowering by possessing expressive qualities not necessarily achievable with traditional physical art materials ( Collie et al., 2006 ; Orr, 2012 ). Digital art making, including in virtual reality, was proposed to reduce inhibitions, promote freedom ( Collie and Čubranić, 1999 ; Darewych et al., 2015 ; Kaimal et al., 2020 ), and facilitate multimodal expression not limited to images ( Collie et al., 2006 ). It was observed that inhibitions were diminished in creating artwork using digital media since there were no expectations of how a digital artwork should look like and it was also speculated if the elusiveness of a computer image might in fact strengthen the therapeutic process ( Collie and Čubranić, 1999 ). VR environments were found to enhance the freedom of expression without the constraints of the physical world, empower clients with restrictions in their movements and “explore creative opportunities otherwise unavailable in the material world” ( Kaimal et al., 2020 ). Playfulness of the artmaking process and creative exploration was another positive aspect of engaging with digital arts media noted in the literature ( Collie and Čubranić, 1999 ; Kaimal et al., 2020 ).

Digital environment

Some unique technological features of digital environments were cited as presenting key advantages for therapy, including portability, “an all-in-one art studio” ( Darewych et al., 2015 ). Several studies reported therapeutic benefits of a mess-free digital environment for art making, particularly for clients resistant to touching materials ( Orr, 2012 ), those who did not want to get messy during art therapy sessions ( Peterson, 2010 ) and particularly for clients with developmental disabilities combined with tactile or olfactory sensitivities ( Darewych et al., 2015 ). Another potentially therapeutic feature of digital arts media was identified as being able to record and preserve the stages of development of an artwork ( Collie et al., 2006 ), or document work in progress to enhance client’s understanding of how their work has developed over time ( Orr, 2012 ).

This review set out to provide some understanding of how digital technology is applied with therapeutic intent within art therapy sessions. We were able to answer two of our research questions, describing how art therapists work with digital technology in their practice and discussing the benefits and challenges of both online provision and the use of digital arts media. The perspective we were able to provide is the one of art therapists’ primarily and still little is known about clients’ experiences, attitudes and outcomes ( Kapitan, 2009 ; Edmunds, 2012 ; Carlton, 2014 ).

Research to date, although some survey-based, is largely qualitative and heterogeneous, presenting difficulties to any inter-studies comparisons. However, these seeming limitations demonstrate, in fact, the seriousness with which the subject has been approached by art therapy practitioners and researchers. Creative use of diverse methodologies to examine art therapists’ views is an essential first step, appropriate for the early stage exploration of how (and indeed, whether) digital technology might be used in art therapy practice. It is appropriate that early investigations are cautious and focused on practitioner’s perspective before any new strategies may be implemented in the actual practice with clients. Such approach seems highly ethical and client-focused, as indeed confirmed in this review in the reasons given by art therapists for their reluctance and cautiousness with which they decide on whether to introduce digital technology in art therapy sessions. Impacts on clients are of primary importance and therapists, understandably, are not willing to compromise on client safety in adopting technological solutions not thoroughly tested ( Peterson, 2010 ; Orr, 2016 ).

Nevertheless, it is important to highlight that the findings in this review are largely based on art therapists’ opinions and attitudes, not necessarily rooted in experience of using technology in practice. Given the common human error of judgment in terms of imagining theoretical concepts in practice, one can only wonder if some of the opinions expressed might have changed following an actual engagement in digital media-based or online practice, particularly if, as suggested ( Asawa, 2009 ), emotions such as fear and anger might guide art therapist’ initial impressions on technology, and, as suggested elsewhere ( Collie et al., 2017 ), art therapists might be surprised at how quickly they start to feel comfortable with technology that they have had a chance to try out.

As suggested previously, the review confirmed that the perception of digital technology in art therapy realm is dominated by ambivalence and tendencies to pull toward and against, which seems an appropriate attitude on encountering something which we do not yet fully understand. Both an increasing interest in the opportunities that digital technology potentially brings, as well as cautiousness around implementation have been apparent in the literature examined. Nevertheless, a common recognition seems to prevail that, given the likely permanency of digital technology in all aspects of our lives, understanding its benefits and potential harm in therapy situations is indeed essential to reduce risks and increase the therapeutic relevance of digital tools ( Kapitan, 2007 ; Asawa, 2009 ; Orr, 2012 ; Kaimal et al., 2016 ).

In addition to the increased research need, the importance of specialist training for art therapists has been commonly advocated ( Orr, 2006 , 2012 ; Kapitan, 2007 ; Kuleba, 2008 ; Carlton, 2014 ; Kaimal et al., 2016 ). A call has also been made for development of new ethical guidelines for art therapists, which would provide an appropriate framework, aligned with practice needs and with practical considerations ( Alders et al., 2011 ; Evans, 2012 ). This need for robust guidance, which would help ensure client safety and increase therapists’ confidence in working with technology, has been highlighted more recently by the changing global health situation (COVID-19 pandemic), in which art therapists found themselves transitioning to online practice with unprecedented speed and often against own preference. It is a striking realization that in a survey conducted only 15 years ago none of the respondents reported that they had conducted online art therapy ( Peterson, 2006 ). McNiff’s prediction from over two decades ago that distance art therapy would grow ( McNiff, 1999 ) has, however, become reality, if only too suddenly for some.

This review has synthesized the challenges and benefits of working with clients online, as reported in literature, and any solutions proposed by the authors. It is clear that distance art therapy differs from the usual face-to-face situation on many levels and requires adaptations on both art therapists’ and clients’ side. The relatively novel way of working therapeutically demands more effort and time initially (e.g., for learning of procedures and devices), but has the potential to become less burdensome practically in the long term (e.g., saving the need to travel to sessions). More importantly, it demands skilful and perhaps more active facilitation from art therapists in order to create a safe enough container for clients in virtual space ( Collie et al., 2017 ). It is recognized that this might be harder to achieve in online therapy and compensations might need to be made for the lack of physical presence and limited non-verbal expressions ( Chilton et al., 2009 ). It has been suggested that semi-anonymity that online contact allows might be both restricting and facilitating for the development of therapeutic relationship and emotional connection ( Collie et al., 2017 ; Levy et al., 2018 ). The responsibility for successful outcomes does not lie entirely with art therapists, and clients might similarly be expected to take on a more active role in their own treatment for a distant art therapy to be beneficial. There is a potential for this increased engagement to promote community integration and to feel empowering for the client ( Orr, 2012 ; Levy et al., 2018 ; Spooner et al., 2019 ). The pace of technological advancements also means that certain technical limitations mentioned in the literature may already be overcome, for example observations by some that a computer is not conducive to group therapy ( Kuleba, 2008 ).

As indicated at the beginning of our work, opportunities and limitations of digital technology in art therapy extend beyond telehealth and remote connectivity. The use of digital arts media presents entirely new challenges for the profession and, arguably, entirely new possibilities with potentially profound impacts on practice. There are polarized opinions and ideas around the therapeutic value and risks of incorporating digital arts media in art therapy sessions.

It has been indicated that digital media provide more security to experiment and offer more freedom of expression due to endless modifications and manipulation of artwork being possible, as well as an option to not leave a trace of one’s creative experimentation if one wish ( Canter, 1987 ; Collie and Čubranić, 1999 ; McLeod, 1999 ; Parker-Bell, 1999 ; Peterson et al., 2005 ; Edmunds, 2012 ; Orr, 2016 ). A notion that making digital art may be less intimidating than working with traditional art materials has been widely discussed in literature ( Weinberg, 1985 ; Hartwich and Brandecker, 1997 ; Collie and Čubranić, 1999 ; McLeod, 1999 ; Thong, 2007 ; Evans, 2012 ; Orr, 2012 ; Kaimal et al., 2016 ). However, it is worth noting that the potentially freeing and playful novelty of digital arts media might not have the same effect nowadays and an observation made in 1999 that people feel less self-conscious due to not having expectations about how a digital image should look like ( Collie and Čubranić, 1999 ) is already likely to be redundant. Similarly, propositions that interaction with digital art making tools gives a sense of mastery and independence ( Canter, 1989 ; Edmunds, 2012 ; Orr, 2012 ) might naturally become less relevant with increased use and familiarity.

Nevertheless, the therapeutic potential of making changes to artwork, recording, sharing and revisiting the process of creation, and allowing both the artwork and the process evolve over time, cannot be underestimated ( Hartwich and Brandecker, 1997 ; McLeod, 1999 ; McNiff, 1999 ; Evans, 2012 ; Orr, 2016 ). Interaction between the person and the electronic device used for art making is potentially therapeutically powerful. It has been suggested that artmaking process becomes a mirror of this relationship ( Hartwich and Brandecker, 1997 ) but also that a computer is simply a mediator in the relationship developing between the client and the therapist ( Orr, 2010 ) or that it can support and provide a transactional space between them ( Gussak and Nyce, 1999 ). The role of the machine in the development of the therapeutic process remains unclear and it will be important to investigate how it affects (or fits within?) the triangular relationship between the client, the therapist and the art.

Probably the most prominent accusation against digital art making tools is their “synthetic” nature, lacking sensual and tactile qualities of traditional arts media, often considered therapeutic in themselves ( Kuleba, 2008 ; Klorer, 2009 ; Potash, 2009 ; Carlton, 2014 ; Orr, 2016 ; Garner, 2017 ). Suggestions have been made that this seemingly distant and nontactile nature of digital arts media might result in clients disconnecting not only from sensory experience but also from relationships and the “real world” in the present moment ( Klorer, 2009 ; Potash, 2009 ). This perception of the isolating, impersonal and even dehumanizing character of digital technology, as well as coldness associated with computers, have been widely discussed by art therapy researchers and practitioners ( Gussak and Nyce, 1999 ; McLeod, 1999 ; Collie and Čubranić, 2002 ; Collie et al., 2006 ; Orr, 2006 ; Kuleba, 2008 ). However, some have observed that constant technological advances gradually lead to the cold digital media becoming more integrated with human interactions, senses and emotions, in increasingly intuitive and responsive way ( Orr, 2012 ). Touchscreen sensitivity, for example, allows for pressure to be incorporated in digital art making, mimicking physical art materials, an important quality which was not previously available for art created with a computer mouse, as noted by McNiff two decades ago ( McNiff, 1999 ). Despite some issues which are unlikely to be resolved, it is probably safe to say that with technology generally becoming more human-oriented we may expect an increasing relevance of digital art making tools for art therapy.

An entirely new art medium which is now available within virtual reality environments presents its own unique concerns and prospects ( Kaimal et al., 2020 ), including creative opportunities reaching beyond material world, but also risks of further disconnection from the real tactile experience. Here also some of the previously expresses preconceptions might be challenged, for example another observation made by McNiff that “computer art will never replace the three-dimensional presence of the actual thing being made” ( McNiff, 2000 , p. 97). It remains debatable of course whether virtual presence is at all comparable to physical experience, but it might be that an opportunity to print out a virtually created artwork using a 3D printer makes the distinction less obvious.

A substantial attention is dedicated in literature to speculation on groups of clients who might benefit most from working with digital arts media. It has been suggested that although this is primarily an individual matter and not necessarily defined by age, contradictory to stereotype ( Asawa, 2009 ), children and young people might be particularly responsive to digital artmaking ( Alders et al., 2011 ; Carlton, 2014 ). Reports on successful practice with hospitalized children highlight the benefit of adaptations enabled by technology to compensate for physical and emotional challenges ( Thong, 2007 ; Malchiodi and Johnson, 2013 ). Digital arts media offer a sterile art making environment ( Malchiodi and Johnson, 2013 ; Orr, 2016 ) and can be used by patients who might not be able to hold art materials but might be able to interact with space or make art on a tablet device using tiny gestures ( McNiff, 1999 ; Hallas and Cleaves, 2017 ). It has been also demonstrated that the previously mentioned lack of sensory input might be therapeutically beneficial for clients with developmental disabilities and those with olfactory and tactile sensitivities ( Darewych et al., 2015 ). It has been proposed that digital art making tools might be in fact an ideal medium for clients easily overwhelmed by tactile sensations ( Alders et al., 2011 ), allowing them to sustain a safer and longer art making experience ( Edmunds, 2012 ).

Some art therapy practitioners and researchers have long made a proposition that technology-enhanced therapy, whether in form of online delivery or adoption of digital arts media for art making, may actually be the best form of therapy for certain clients and not a mere substitute for more traditional ways of working ( Collie and Čubranić, 1999 ; McNiff, 1999 ; Parker-Bell, 1999 ; Evans, 2012 ). Others have pointed out to contradictory beliefs of some art therapy practitioners, focusing more on potential risks and worrying that technology would “remove what art therapy holds sacred, which is the art.” ( Asawa, 2009 , p. 64). Between the two polarizing perspectives might be most commonly advocated one, that digital technology is not a replacement for traditional arts media or long established ways of working, but rather an added value, a new quality, expanding and not limiting the profession ( McLeod, 1999 ; McNiff, 1999 ; Orr, 2006 ; Choe, 2014 ).

While flexibility and adaptability have been cited as qualities shared by art therapists that could support them in the predicted continued integration of technology in therapy ( Spooner et al., 2019 ), a question remains whether art therapy profession would accept technology as a true creative and therapeutic medium ( McNiff, 1999 ; Peterson, 2006 ; Austin, 2009 ). Over three decades ago, it was suggested that the answer might depend on art therapists’ innate curiosity as artists to investigate the new medium ( Canter, 1989 ) and, more recently, that the potential of technology in art therapy is only limited by practitioners’ creativity and imagination ( McLeod, 1999 ; McNiff, 1999 ; Peterson, 2010 ). It has been already proposed that art therapy profession, to remain relevant, might need to “move beyond historically validated media” and also to new contexts ( Kapitan, 2007 , p. 51).

Future Research

Given the growing interest in digital technology within art therapy world and the current global health crisis (COVID-19 pandemic) which forced therapists to move their practice online, we expect and would welcome a rise in research in the area. While we already have some understanding of art therapists’ perspective, more research to explore clients’ experiences is clearly needed. This research need must not, however, compromise on clients’ safety and ethical ways of working with technology in art therapy sessions and should observe (and help develop) guidelines from professional associations for the discipline ( Zubala and Hackett, 2020 ). Once new ways of working are established, these need to be reflected in art therapists’ education and research could contribute to identifying the needs for training.

Rise in online art therapy practice could be observed on a large scale in the previous months (second trimester of 2020) and new interventions have been developed with impacts already captured in research which was in press at the time of writing of this review (e.g., Gomez Carlier et al., 2020 ; Newland et al., 2020 ). It is important that these accounts of sudden changes in practice are recorded and examined for any lessons to be learned for a longer-term approach to how art therapy might contribute to mitigating the psychological impacts of the pandemic, which are likely yet to emerge ( Miller and McDonald, 2020 ; Titov et al., 2020 ; Wind et al., 2020 ; Zubala and Hackett, 2020 ). The research to follow must acknowledge the extraordinary circumstances under which art therapy has adopted online mode of working, often not by choice but due to demands of the situation and clients’ or employers’ expectations. This fact alone and combined with other factors may have huge implications for practice and we hope that these are captured sensitively in forthcoming research.

Regardless of the mode of delivery, there remains a lot to learn in terms of the emotional and interpersonal implications of digital artmaking for the development of the therapeutic relationship. Previous research encouragingly indicates that therapeutic alliance in verbal psychotherapies can be successfully recreated in an online setting ( Sucala et al., 2012 ). In art therapy case, however, potential impact of technology is not limited to client-therapist relationship but extends to the essence of the triangular relationship including also the artwork. Understanding the impacts of digital tools on the dynamics of this triangular relationship and their place within it seems fundamental to increasing art therapists’ confidence in introducing digital arts media in sessions.

Limitations

This review attempted to capture research findings from diverse literature for a holistic understanding of the topic ( Whittemore and Knafl, 2005 ) and we recognize that such approach brings some inevitable challenges which we were able to address partially.

Firstly, the heterogeneous character of included studies and breadth of perspectives adopted by the authors meant that the synthesis relied vastly on our own interpretation of the findings due to no specific guidance on such syntheses available. Neither meta-analysis nor meta-synthesis could be performed and instead a method not dissimilar to thematic analysis was employed for identifying key themes often present across the literature examined. It might be that such approach could have missed some of the findings potentially best captured via another methodology. Additionally, inclusion of papers focusing on art therapists’ views and opinions mean that findings are based on both the anticipated and the actual practice-based experiences.

Secondly, we acknowledge that PhD theses, dissertations and book chapters were deliberately excluded from the review due to limited resources and also due to expected further complexities arising from an attempt to synthesize insights from these data sources. The searches have, however, identified substantial volume of material on the subject published in books and available as unpublished doctoral theses and masters dissertations and it would have been valuable to examine these also, perhaps in a more narrative type of review or as part of more specific sub-topic explorations. Similarly, only articles presenting empirical findings were included which means that a number of important opinion papers have not been formally a part of this review. Instead, recognizing the contribution of these authors to the overall conversation, we refer to their work in the extended discussion section. We are also aware that strict inclusion criteria meant that some contemporary uses of digital technology in art therapy such as digital photography, computer animation or digital storytelling, are not discussed here. Peer-reviewed papers in these areas seem sparse despite comprehensive practice-based literature available (e.g., Loewenthal, 2013 ; Malchiodi, 2018 ). Therefore, while it was not our intention to exclude these widely used techniques, we acknowledge that this review might not be a complete representation of practice, now commonly adopting many other imaginative uses of digital technology.

Thirdly, we chose not to undertake a formal quality assessment of the studies included, which might have enabled a fairer weight to be allocated to findings, currently considered and presented as being of equal value. An informal quality assessment has been, however, included and we decided that a more formal analysis would not match the complexity of the topic and the nature of the very early exploratory studies, meaning that useful insights might be lost with a standardized form of assessment applied. With progress in research in the area and more methodologically coherent groupings of studies possible, we expect that future syntheses would be able to perform more formalized quality assessments, particularly on studies that report on client experiences.

This review offers an integrative synthesis of research undertaken to date on the use of digital technology in art therapy, including both online connectivity allowing distance delivery as well as digital artmaking within therapy sessions. The complex characteristics and methodologies of included papers resulted in diverse findings which were integrated to identify key themes in the growing debate on the role of digital technology in art therapy. Potential benefits and challenges were identified, including impacts on the therapy process and the therapeutic relationship. It may be safely concluded that the use of technology in art therapy presents both immense opportunities and serious risks that need to be considered by practitioners, professional associations, and the clients themselves. It is important that early research in the area strives to examine both in order to help art therapists make an informed choice when deciding on whether to incorporate digital technologies in their practice.

We would like to invite the art therapy community worldwide to expand this conversation and to explore together, safely but with curiosity and openness, the expanse of the digital world which, if nothing else, deserves our consideration of its relationship to art therapy. We propose that we approach this exploration with acknowledgment of its importance for the continued relevance of art therapy ( Kapitan, 2007 ) but also reflecting that “art therapy is eclectic and not reducible to a single set of algorithms” ( Gussak and Nyce, 1999 , p. 194). It might be a demanding but a fascinating journey.

Author Contributions

AZ conceptualized, planned, and undertook the review, analyzed the data, and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. NK and SH revised the work critically and contributed to edits. All authors contributed to and approved the final version of the manuscript.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

AZ would like to thank co-authors, Catriona MacInnes, Simon Reekie, Gill Houlsby, and other art therapists, conversations with whom helped shape the thinking about this research.

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Keywords : art therapy, digital technology, remote delivery, digital arts media, telehealth, online therapy, integrative review

Citation: Zubala A, Kennell N and Hackett S (2021) Art Therapy in the Digital World: An Integrative Review of Current Practice and Future Directions. Front. Psychol. 12:595536. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.600070

Received: 01 September 2020; Accepted: 12 March 2021; Published: 08 April 2021.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2021 Zubala, Kennell and Hackett. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Ania Zubala, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Quantum leap: how a decade of NFTs has changed digital art

Two books take a look at the past and future of the non-fungible token. once seen as the creature of market hype, the nft now promises the first shared technical standard for the digital art world.

“This idea has refused to die”: Kevin McCoy, Quantum (2014), the first non-fungible token (NFT), a 179-frame screen recorded loop from a code-generated animation. From Robert Alice (editor), On NFTs (Taschen, 2024) Courtesy Kevin McCoy

The 10-year anniversary of a once-controversial new form of digital art, and disruptor of the art market, NFTs (non-fungible tokens), falls on 2 May.

In the lead-up to that anniversary, two important new publications combine to provide the first comprehensive history of a form that the art historian and critic A. V. Marraccini calls “a commodity, a provocation, a para-medium, a shibboleth, an inscribed artefact of capital at speed". On NFTs , edited by the artist and writer Robert Alice and published by Taschen, and a collected volume of essays drawn from the website Right Click Save , come with two complementary kinds of authority.

On NFTs is substantial in size and price—£750 for its cheapest first release (a general trade edition will follow later)—and has the feel and rigour of a catalogue raisonné. Its editorial aspiration, marked by that “On” in the title and each of its component essays, comes rooted in the grand tradition. “The title On NFTs is inspired by the art-historical and cryptographic tradition of the treatise," Alice writes, "exemplified best by the Renaissance artist, art historian, and cryptographer Leon Battista Alberti’s ... two treatises De Pictura/On Painting (1450) and De Cifris/On Ciphers (1466). Before the advent of blockchain, there exists no one individual in history who has furthered the dual fields of art and cryptography in equal measure.” Alice tells The Art Newspaper that he sees On NFTs as “a slow look at a fast art”.

Robert Alice breaks new ground with auction of generative art NFTs on Christie's 3.0

Right Click Save is witness to ideas taking flight as NFTs exploded, imploded then rose again. Writing in the introduction, Alex Estorick, editor of both the book and the online magazine, says the book's purpose is to create “a series of new media genealogies — what we termed 'crypto histories' — that situated ongoing developments within an expanded understanding of art.”

Both books are serious and compelling in their attempts to align NFTs with a wider perspective of the art market and art history. But looking back is only half the story. As NFTs begin their second decade it is important that their history is understood. Equally—as both books make clear—here is a compelling story still forming in a rich, complex artistic and cultural ecosystem around NFTs and the wider technologies of the blockchain and Web3 that they emerged from.

Robert Alice, On NFTs (Taschen 2024), showing the opening spread of the "NFTs are" section and the slip cover and stainless steel case for the Hard Code edition of the book, which was offered to the first 10 buyers at the auction sale on Christies 3.0 in March of Alice's related generative art series SOURCE [On NFTs] Courtesy of Taschen and Robert Alice. Photograph © Mark Seelen

Artists are adopting NFTs in their practice and leading museums have recently adopted them as part of their visitor experience. New kinds of cultural and public institution are forming around the blockchain technologies that NFTs are based on. And the sales market itself is in a new phase of growth after the wild explosion and near collapse of 2021 and 2022.

At a time when digital art is capturing public attention in numerous domains, now is a good moment to ask again why NFTs matter, and what they tell us about the future of art in a digitising world.

The Origins of NFTs

On 3 May 2014, the artists Jennifer and Kevin McCoy were attending the Seven on Seven conference organised by the the “born-digital” art non-profit Rhizome in New York City.

During a live presentation, they set out what they describe now as their, “vision of how blockchain systems could bring uniqueness to digital artworks and how such a system could create provenance, verification and markets in a natively digital way”.

The artwork they used to demonstrate this process was called Quantum , a 360x360 pixel, 179-frame screen recorded loop from a code-generated animation, minted on 2 May 2014. It would become the first NFT. From this simple beginning, the McCoys tell The Art Newspaper , “over the last 10 years this idea has refused to die and it is now bigger and more pervasive than we could have imagined.”

Three years later the idea of collectible, tradable, digital assets registered on the blockchain began to take off. The Ethereum blockchain offered a more flexible development environment than Bitcoin or other early blockchain platforms, and its launch in 2015 had given birth to the early NFT art movement by 2017.

That movement began with Curio Cards developed by Travis Uhrig, Thomas Hunt, and Rhett Creighton and released in May 2017. Soon followed by Cryptopunks and CryptoKitties , it established a style for early NFT art—simple illustration, sarcastic humour and pop-culture references —that seemed more an outgrowth of the depths of memes and social media culture than anything with a pretence to “art”. ​​

Seemingly self-contained within its own edgy, sarcastic universe, NFTs and NFT culture grew over the next three years, but it was with the Covid pandemic that NFTs exploded into the mainstream and created their own strange detonation of the contemporary art market.

Icarus rising—NFTs in 2021-22

The NFT bubble of 2021-22 showed how digital markets and digital media frenzy are inseparable in the crypto domain. Whilst the $69.3 million that Beeple’s Everydays — The First 5000 Days sold for at Christie’s in March 2021 remains astonishing, it is the aspirations behind its purchase which seem ambitious even three years later.

Beeple’s collection of his work, popular on Instagram but barely known beyond it, was bought by a crypto-fund called Metapurse. For them it was an asset that would help build a financial ecosystem through the launch of their own crypto-coin, B20—a coin which offered fractional ownership of what was now one of the top three most expensive artworks in the world. Around the B20 coin, Metapurse built digital museums and signed licensing deals—at pace they were constructing not just a new world-famous artist, but also a new kind of financial and art market from that artist. There was little comparison for this, and it was happening so fast it was hard for anyone to keep up.

But people were buying. In 2021, NFT trading—conservatively—reached $13 billion. The NFT was everywhere, and in the depths of a Covid pandemic, it still came as no surprise when "NFT" was named as Word of the Year by Collins dictionaries.

But for Metapurse and others, it could not last. The bottom fell out of the market in 2023. In the wider crypto space, many Towers of Babel were falling all at once with the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX just the most notable of series of disasters that were closer to the avant-garde farce of Thomas Pynchon than the ubermensch fantasy of the books by Ayn Rand so beloved by Silicon Valley.

The birth of a shared ecosystem

It was hard to turn away from the remarkable ascent, and then dramatic crash of the NFT from 2021 to 2023.

Digital markets have been prone to boom and bust driven by what the economist Robert J. Shiller calls “narrative economics”—online noise driving a hype-and-crash cycle of extreme speed. But whilst the world was watching, elsewhere, quietly and patiently, new organisations and institutions were building connections between NFTs and the wider Web3 and blockchain culture with art galleries and museums; significant artists were both adopting and emerging from the medium, and threads between NFT art and art history were being tied.

Making connections between NFTs and wider contemporary art and art history has been advocated by the website Right Click Save . Founded in 2021 by Jason Bailey, and edited by Estorick, Right Click Save has pursued three ideas: “to encourage healthy debate; to celebrate digital art for the vital cultural contribution it makes; and to blend the rigour of traditional art scholarship with a form of radical inclusivity that rejects elitism on the basis that art can be made and enjoyed by everyone.” The Right Click Save book, published by Vetro, is an elegant testimony to that purpose.

If Right Click Save has been the storyteller, then Diane Drubay, founder of We Are Museums and the WAC Lab has been its most successful connector. WAC Lab, launched at Art Basel in 2021, is an innovation programme and accelerator. Now in its third cohort, it guides museums and cultural institutions through a structured multi-week programme of understanding Web3, NFTs and blockchain. Each participant develops an early stage prototype project with a specialist blockchain start-up.

Paris's Centre Pompidou breaks new ground by acquiring 18 NFTs

Their first notable success was with the integration of NFT collectibles into the digital artist Ian Cheng’s show Life After BOB (September 2022) with the Light Art Foundation in Berlin. Forty-four institutions have so far participated. In its second season, the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris, marked, as Drubay says, “another significant milestone”. After participation in the program, says Drubay, “the museum embraced a bold Web3 strategy, introducing digital souvenirs by Keru and collaborating with the artist and musician Agoria to offer a captivating artistic experience. ⁤⁤Visitors were invited to participate in a contemplative artistic experience, blowing into their phones to generate live artwork inspired by the museum’s collection, subsequently minted as NFTs.”

The Musée d’Orsay is one of the largest museums to have shown significant and nuanced adoption of NFTs into its visitor offer. Also in Paris, the Centre Pompidou in February 2023 made a major acquisition of NFTs (and recently acquired a piece by Robert Alice, editor of On NFTs ).

Mail art meets NFTs for all in the ‘MoMA Postcard’ programme

In New York, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has also explored different ways NFTs might become part of its visitor experience. In just a few short weeks in October and November 2023, they launched an NFT collectible as part of their staging of Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised project, and then their Postcards project, which allowed you to create and share simple digital postcards through an NFT wallet. At a point when the SEC was clamping down on the commercial trading of crypto-currency, MoMA acted to show the non-financial way NFTs could be traded on values of friendship and sharing.

Even Beeple, the original renegade outlier of the NFT market, has started drawing threads between his work and the wider art world. After opening a 50,000 sq foot studio in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2023, he has begun working in partnerships with the Gibbes Museum in the city and others. Everywhere now, new connections are being made that tie NFTs to the contemporary and to wider culture, recasting them as another part of art’s rich story.

Radical friends—alternative cultural institutions

Playing nice between the world of NFTs and the contemporary and institutional art world is all well and good, but it risks overlooking the crypto-world’s radical roots.

Whilst these bridges are being built, elsewhere NFTs and the blockchain have inspired entirely new visions for what artistic practice, galleries and museums might look like in a Web3 world, rewriting institutional rules and behaviours of cultural institutions for a digital world.

Of the different ways to do this, the blockchain and the Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (the DAO) offers the most potential. It presents a system for alternative hyper-democratic forms of digital governance on which new organisations can grow. Ruth Catlow, founder of Furtherfield, brilliantly explored this in her book Radical Friends (2022), which looks at the different ways in which DAOs could lead to inclusivity, equity and eco-social change.

In London’s Hackney Wick, one model of how DAO’s might shape tomorrow’s art institutions is taking shape: ArtSect Gallery . ArtSect offers one glimpse of an alternative future. But perhaps the key decentralised museum project is Arkive , which emerged out of the mainstream West Coast crypto community. Arkive describes itself as “a museum curated by the people", with a mission to build “the most expansive and representative collection of culturally significant art & artifacts”.

What Arkive represents is a serious, well-funded attempt to build a digital-age museum around the principals of the DAO—and then place it in the middle of the contemporary art world. Founded by the tech industry-veteran Tom MacLeod, Arkive has very rapidly built a community of real action and system-changing potential.

Core to what Arkive does is collective acquisition of art and artefacts—building a collection that, whilst still in its early stages, represents a search for objects that reflect, embody, and witness turning points in art or culture driven by technological advances. From Nam June Paik to Lyn Hershman Leeson, to key video from the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, the community-curated acquisitions are building a collection of significance and with a real point of view.

What Arkive is doing is building leverage. As Arkive grows it will lend its collection. A virtual institution with a collection of real value holds some power to influence change, making new rules that others may need to bend to. It is an example that will inspire others and deserves close attention.

Where next? Towards an integrated digital art market

Where will this lead us? What will NFTs, Web3 and blockchain look like when they are 20, 30 or 40?

At a point where digital art is becoming hyper-visible through the rise of what, in February 2024, The Art Newspaper called “the immersive institution” , it may be that what we are seeing is the coming into being of an integrated digital art market which has both end-points where new work by major artists can be both seen by—sometimes—millions of people, and bought by collectors.

Tipping point: how new immersive institutions are changing the art world

That possibility has opened doors for artists of a previous generation of digital art for whom the fragmentation of digital art has meant both creative opportunity but also a terrible fragility in the preservation and market-access of their work.

Auriea Harvey is one of this wide body of artists who’ve worked across web and net art. The retrospective of her work now on show at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image brilliantly captures her experiments in 3D printing and other physical, preservable digital technologies. But a body of her work is absent—the net art, websites and games she has made which over the last 25 years have depended on obsolescent technologies—and are now a sad list of increasingly inaccessible links on her website.

This ultimately is why NFTs matter, and why we are at a transitional moment. As the McCoys saw right back with Quantum , NFTs and the permanent record they create are a chance to document, preserve and build a viable market for digital art that the earlier decades of experiment lacked. They are a common technical standard from which a medium can grow—the closest thing we have to canvas for digital art—in the permanent certification they provide to images, video and other digital formats.

Out of that commonality, the rest of the NFT’s and the blockchain’s rich promise may begin to be realised. As Diane Drubay says, “With blockchain, decentralisation, immersive experiences, and AI advancements, we face a seismic shift in content and culture creation as well as in distribution and ownership. More than the technologies and their applications, it is a redefinition of roles, timelines, and spaces.”

The first ten years have been just the start of the NFT journey. There is much more to come.

• Robert Alice (editor), On NFTs (Taschen, 2024)
• Alex Estorick (editor), Right Click Save (Vetro Editions, 2024)

April 1, 2024

Inside the Race to Protect Artists from Artificial Intelligence

AI-generated art is creating new ethical issues—and competition—for digital artists. Nightshade and Glaze are two tools helping creators fight back.

By Rachel Feltman & Lauren Leffer

UGUISU/Getty Images

Lauren Leffer: Generative artificial intelligence tools can now instantly produce images from text prompts. It’s neat tech, but could mean trouble for professional artists.

Rachel Feltman: Yeah, because thoseAI tools make it really easy to instantly just rip off someone’s style.

Leffer: That’s right, generative AI, which is trained on real peoples’ work, can end up really hurting the artists that enable its existence. But some have started fighting back with nifty technical tools of their own.

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Feltman: It turns out that the pixel is mightier than the sword. I’m Rachel Feltman, a new member of the Science, Quickly team. Leffer: And I’m Lauren Leffer, contributing writer at Scientific American.

Feltman: And you’re listening to Scientific American’s Science, Quickly podcast.

[Clip: Show theme music]

Feltman: So I have zero talent as a visual artist myself, but it seems like folks in that field have really been feeling the pressure from generative AI.

Leffer: Absolutely, yeah. I’ve heard from friends who’ve had a harder time securing paid commissions than ever before. You know, people figure they can just whip up an AI-generated image instead of paying an actual human to do the work. Some even use AI to overtly dupe specific artists. But there’s at least one little tiny spot of hope. It’s this small way for artists to take back a scrap of control over their work and digital presence.

Feltman: It’s like a form of self-defense.

Leffer: Right, let’s call it self-defense, but it’s also a little bit of offense.

It’s this pair of free-to-use computer programs called Glaze and Nightshade developed by a team of University of Chicago computer scientists, in collaboration with artists. Both tools add algorithmic cloaks over the tops of digital images that change how AI models interpret the picture, but keep it looking basically unchanged to a human eye.

Feltman: So once you slap one of these filters on your artwork, does that make it effectively off-limits to an AI training model?

Leffer: Yeah, basically. It can’t be used to train generative image models in the same way once it’s been “glazed” or “shaded” – which is what they call an image passed through Nightshade. And, with Nightshade specifically, it actually might mess up a model’s other training– it throws a wrench in the whole process.

Feltman: That sounds like karma to me. I’d love to hear more about how that works. But before we dig into the technical stuff, I have to ask: shouldn’t artists already be protected by copyright laws? Like, why do we need these technical tools to begin with?

Leffer: Yeah, great question– so right now, whether or not copyright law defends against creative work being used to train AI, it’s this really big, unresolved legal gray area, kind of a floating question mark. There are multiple pending lawsuits on the subject, including ones brought by artists against AI image generators, and even The New York Times against OpenAI, because the tech company used the newspaper’s articles to train its large language models. So far, AI companies have claimed that pulling digital content into training databases falls under this protection clause of fair use.

Feltman: And I guess as long as those cases are still playing out, in the meantime, artists just can’t really avoid feeding that AI monster if they want to promote their work online. Which, obviously, they have to do.

Leffer: Right, exactly. Glaze and Nightshade– and similar tools, there are other ones out there like Mist– they aren’t permanent solutions. But they’re offering artists a little bit of peace of mind in the interim.

Feltman: Great names all around.How did these tools come to be?

Leffer: Let’s start with a little bit of background. Before we had generative AI, there was facial recognition AI. That laid the technical groundwork for adversarial filters, which adjust photos to prevent them from being recognized by software. The developers of Glaze and Nightshade, they’d previously released one of these tools, called Fawkes, after the V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes mask.

Feltman : Another great name.

Leffer: Yeah it’s very into, like, the tech-dystopia world.

Feltman : Totally.

Leffer: Fawkes cloaked faces, and in 2023, the research team started hearing from artists asking if Fawkes would work help to hide their work from AI too. Initially, you know, the answer was no, but it did prompt the computer scientists to begin developing programs that could help artists cloak work.

Feltman : So what do these tools do?

Leffer: Glaze and Nightshade, they do slightly different things, but let's start with the similarities. Both programs apply filters. They alter the pixels in digital pictures in subtle ways that are confusing to machine learning models but unobtrusive (mostly) to humans.

Feltman: Very cool in theory, but how does it work?

Leffer: You know how, with optical illusions, a tiny tweak can suddenly make you see a totally different thing? Feltman: Ah yes, like the infamous dress that was definitely blue and black, and not white and gold at all.

Leffer: Right there with you. Yeah, so optical illusions happen because human perception is imperfect, we have these quirks inherent to how our brains interpret what we see. For instance, you know, people have a tendency to see human faces in inanimate objects.

Feltman : So true, like every US power outlet is just a scared lil guy.

Leffer: Absolutely, yeah– power outlets, cars, mailboxes– all of them have their own faces and personalities.

Feltman : 100%.

Leffer: Computers don’t see the world the same way that humans do, but they have their own perceptual vulnerabilities. And the developers of Glaze and Nightshade built an algorithm that figures out those quirks and the best way to exploit them, and then modifies an image accordingly. It’s a delicate balancing act. You want to stump the AI model, but you also want to keep things stable enough that a human viewer doesn’t notice much of a change. In fact, the developers kind of got to that balanced point through trial and error.

Feltman: Yeah, that makes sense. It’s really hard to mask and distort an image without masking and distorting an image. So they’re able to do this in a way that we can’t perceive, but what does that look like from the AI’s perspective?

Leffer: Another great question.To train an image-generating AI model to pump out pictures, you give it lots of images along with descriptive text. The model learns to associate certain words with visual features– think shapes or colors, but really it’s something else we can’t necessarily perceive because it’s a computer. And under the hood, all of these associations are stored within basically multidimensional maps. Similar concepts and types of features are clustered near one another.

With the algorithm that underlie Glaze and Nightshade, the computer scientists strategically force associations between unrelated concepts, so they move points on that multidimensional map closer and closer together.

Feltman: Yeah, I think I can wrap my head around how that would confuse an AI model.

Leffer: Yeah, it’s all still a little hand wavey because what it really comes down to is some complex math. Ben Zhao, the lead researcher at University of Chicago behind these cloaking programs, said that developing the algorithms was akin to solving two sets of linear equations.

Feltman: Not my strong suit. So I will take his word for it.

Leffer : Me either. That’s why we’re at a podcast instead.

Feltman : So why two tools? How are these different?

Leffer: Glaze came out first. It was kind of the entry, the foray, into this world. It’s very focused on cloaking an artists’ style. So this thing kept happening to prominent digital artists where someone would take an open source generative AI model and train it on just that artist’s work. That gave them a tool for producing style mimics. Obviously this can mean fewer paid opportunities for the artist in question, but it also opens creators up to reputational threats. You could use one of these style mimics to make it seem like an artist had created a really offensive image, or something else that they would never make.

Feltman: That sounds like such a nightmare.

Leffer: Absolutely, in the same nightmare zone as deep fakes and everything happening with generative AI right now. So because of that, Zhao and his colleagues put out Glaze, which tricks AI models into perceiving the wrong style. Let’s say your aesthetic is very cutesy, and bubbly and cartoon-ey. If you Glaze your work, an AI model might instead see Picasso-esque cubism. It makes it way harder to train style mimics.

Feltman: Very cool. You mentioned that these tools can also play a little bit of offense against AI art generators. Is that where Nightshade comes in?

Leffer: That’s right. An image cloaked in Nightshade will teach AI to incorrectly associate not just styles but also fundamental ideas and images. As a hypothetical example, it would only take a few hundred Nightshade-treated images to retrain a model to think cats are dogs. Zhao says that hundreds of thousands of people have already downloaded and begun deploying Nightshade. And so his hope– and his co-researcher’s hope and the artist’s hope– is that with all of these images out there, it will become costly enough and annoying enough for AI companies to weed through masked picture, they’ll be more incentivized to pay artists willing to license their work for training instead of just trawling the entire web.

Feltman: And if nothing else, it’s just very satisfying.

Leffer : Yeah, it’s catharsis at some baseline level.

Feltman : Yeah, so it sounds like the idea is to kind of even out the power differential between AI developers and artists, is that right?

Leffer: Yeah, these tools, they definitely tip the balance a little bit, but they’re certainly not a complete solution–they’re more like a stop gap. For one, artists can’t retroactively protect any art that’s already been hoovered up into AI training datasets, they can only apply these tools to newer work. Plus, AI technology is advancing super super fast. I spoke with some AI experts who were quick to point out that neither Glaze nor Nightshade are future proof. They could be compromised moving forward. AI models could just change into things that have different structure and architecture. Already, one group of machine learning academics has partially succeeded at getting around the Glaze cloak.

Feltman: Wow that was fast. That’s a few months after it came out, right?

Leffer: Yeah, it’s quick, though that’s kind of the nature of digital security, as Zhao told me in his own words: “it’s always a cat-and-mouse game.”

Feltman: And I guess even if Glaze and Nightshade continue to work perfectly, it’s still unfair for artists to have to take those extra steps. Leffer: Yes, absolutely great point. I spoke with a professional illustrator, Mignon Zakuga, who’s been really enthusiastic about Glaze and Nightshade. She was involved in beta testing, and still uses both cloaks regularly when she uploads her work. But even she said that passing images through the filters is not the greatest or easiest process. It can take a couple of hours, and even though they’re not supposed to be noticeable, often the visual changes are , at least to her. And especially to her, as the artist who made the image. So Zakuga told me it’s a compromise she’s willing to deal with for now. But clearly, artists deserve better, more robust protections.

Feltman: Yeah like– and I know this is wild– but what about actual policy or legislation?

Leffer: 100%, it would be great to get to a point where all of that is clarified especially in policy and law. But no one really knows what that should or will look like. Will copyright end up being enforced against AI? Do we need some whole new suite of protective laws? But at the very least, programs like Glaze and Nightshade, they offer us a little more time to figure that all out.

Leffer: Science Quickly is produced by Jeff DelViscio, Tulika Bose, Rachel Feltman, Kelso Harper and Carin Leong. Our show is edited by Elah Feder and Alexa Lim. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.

Feltman: Don’t forget to subscribe to Science Quickly wherever you get your podcasts. For more in-depth science news and features, go to ScientificAmerican.com . And if you like the show, give us a rating or review!

Leffer: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Lauren Leffer.

Feltman: I’m Rachel Feltman. See you next time!

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Proposals Sought for an Edited Collection of "Conservative" Writing

Call for Chapter Proposals for an Edited Collection

No Lost Causes: An Anthology of Conservative Writing on Art, Society, and Culture

Since the middle of the twentieth century, cultural criticism in the West has been dominated by post-structuralist assumptions about truth, meaning, universal values, etc. Long before then, however, it was understood that art had a higher purpose, that artists sought to inculcate certain values in their audience, whether moral, ethical, or religious. Theorists from Aristotle to Matthew Arnold took it for granted that works of art, in short, do not exist merely for their own sake, but to teach us something about the human experience. Through the work of Paul Elmore More, Irving Babbitt, T. S. Eliot, and the Southern Agrarians, among others, the lingering influence of this view endured into the twentieth century.

I invite proposals for an edited collection of essays that seek to continue these efforts in the twenty-first. Our goal is to articulate and defend conservative approaches to art, society, and culture, like those favored by the individuals named above. Essays are welcome on a wide range of topics, including conservatism in or and any of the following:

Ancient Greece or Rome

Medieval or early modern art

• The Romantic or Victorian eras

Critical evaluations of post-structuralism and its off-shoots (e.g., Marxism, gender theory)

Specific authors or literary theorists

Christianity

• Popular culture

I am also interested in analyses of individual books, movies, and other forms of art that reflect a conservate sensibility. Regardless of topic, the focus of your essay should be aesthetic, rather than political.

Queries and proposals are welcome from recent graduates, independent scholars, and established academics alike. If interested, please send an abstract of 100 - 200 words and a CV to [email protected] by 15 July 2024. I expect to make a decision on submitted proposals by the end of summer. Initial drafts of 5000 - 8000 words, in Turabian / Chicago, would be due by 31 January 2025.

About the editor: Camilo Peralta, PhD, is an Associate Professor of English at Joliet Junior College who has published widely on religion, fantasy, and science fiction. His first scholarly monograph, The Wizard of Mecosta: Russell Kirk, Gothic Fiction, and the Moral Imagination , is available now from Vernon Press: https://vernonpress.com/book/1933

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Opinion Guest Essay

An Idyll on the Shores of a Toxic Lake

Supported by

Text by Jaime Lowe

Photographs by Nicholas Albrecht

Ms. Lowe is the author of, most recently, “Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Lines of California’s Wildfires.” Mr. Albrecht is a photographer based in Oakland, Calif.

• March 29, 2024

There are two ways to experience the town of Bombay Beach, Calif., as a visitor: gawk at the spectacle or fall into the vortex. Thousands of tourists cruise through each year, often without getting out of their cars, to see decaying art installations left over from an annual mid-March gathering of artists, photographers and documentarians known jokingly as the Bombay Beach Biennale. When I went to the town for the first time in 2021, I was looking for salvation in this weird desert town on the Salton Sea south of Palm Springs and Joshua Tree National Park. I dropped in, felt vibes and left with stories. I stared at the eccentric large-scale art, posted photos on Instagram of ruin porn and a hot pink sign on the beach that said, “If you’re stuck, call Kim.” I posed in front of a mountain of painted televisions, swung on a swing over the edge of the lake’s retreating shoreline and explored the half-buried, rusted-out cars that make up an abandoned ersatz drive-in movie theater. On that trip, it felt as if I were inside a “Mad Max” simulation, but I was only scratching the surface of the town.

I returned in December to try to understand why Bombay Beach remains so compelling, especially as extreme weather — heat, hurricanes and drought — and pollution wreak ever more intense havoc on it. Summer temperatures can reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit, tremors from the San Andreas Fault strike regularly, bomb testing from nearby military facilities can be heard and felt, and the air is so toxic from pesticide use, exhaust fumes, factory emissions and dust rising from the retreating Salton Sea that one study showed asthma rates among children in the region are three times the national average. By the end of the decade, the Salton Sea, California’s largest inland body of water, at about 325 square miles, may lose three-quarters of its volume; in the past 20 years, the sea’s surface area has shrunk about 38 square miles .

But people who live in Bombay Beach stay because the town offers a tight-knit community in the midst of catastrophe. Though its residents contend with environmental adversity on a daily basis, they’re also demonstrating how to navigate the uncertain future we all face — neglect, the fight for scarce resources, destruction of home, the feeling of having no place to go. They are an example of how people can survive wild climate frontiers together.

The 250 or so town residents live in the low desert on the east shore of the Salton Sea, which formed in 1905 when the then-flush Colorado River spilled into a depression, creating a freshwater lake that became increasingly saline. There used to be fish — mullet and carp, then tilapia. In the 1950s and ’60s, the area was marketed as a tourist destination and was advertised as Palm Springs by the Sea. More tourists visited Bombay Beach than Yosemite. There were yacht clubs, boat races and water skiing. It became a celebrity magnet: Frank Sinatra hung out there; so did the Beach Boys and Sonny and Cher.

Eventually, as agricultural runoff kept accumulating in a body of water with no drainage, it became toxic and created a lake with salinity that is now 50 percent greater than that of the ocean. In the 1980s, dead fish washed up on the sand, car ruins rusted in the sun, tires rotted on the shore. Tourism vanished. But some in the community hung on. One way to define Bombay Beach is through environmental disaster, but another way is as an example of how to live through disaster and how to live in general.

Candace Youngberg, a town council member and a bartender at the Ski Inn, remembers a very different Bombay Beach. When she was growing up in the 1980s, she’d ride bikes with neighborhood children and run from yard to yard in a pack because there were no fences. But over time, the town changed. With each passing year, she watched necessities disappear. Now there’s no gas station, no laundromat, no hardware store. Fresh produce is hard to come by. A trailer that was devoted to medical care shut down. In 2021, 60.9 percent of Bombay Beach residents lived below the poverty line, compared with the national average of 12.6 percent.

As painful as it was to witness the town of her youth disappear and as deep as the problems there go, Ms. Youngberg admits that adversity bonded those who stayed. She wanted to return Bombay Beach to the version of the town she remembered, to recreate a beautiful place to live year-round, not just in winter, not just during the art season, not just for the tourists posing in front of wreckage. She wanted people to see the homes, the town, the community that once thrived thrive again. With the art came attention and the potential for more resources. She got on the Bombay Beach Community Services District, a town council, and started to work toward improvements like fixing the roads and planting trees to improve air quality.

It might just be that Bombay Beach is a small town, but when I visited last winter, there was something that felt more collaborative, as though everybody’s lives and business and projects overlapped. I’m not sure the community that’s there now started out as intentional, but when fragmented groups of people come together as custodians of an enigmatic space, responsible for protecting it and one another, community is inevitable. Plus, there’s only one place to socialize, one place to gossip, one place to dance out anxiety and only about two-thirds of a square mile to wander. Whether you like it or not, your neighbors are your people — a town in its purest form.

When I was there, I walked the streets with Denia Nealy, an artist who goes by Czar, and my friend Brenda Ann Kenneally, a photographer and writer, who would shout names, and people would instantly emerge. A stranger offered a handful of Tater Tots to Czar and me in a gesture that felt emblematic: Of course a complete stranger on an electric unicycle would cruise by and share nourishment. I was given a butterfly on a stick, which I carried around like a magic wand because that seemed appropriate and necessary. I was told that if I saw a screaming woman walking down the street with a shiv in her hand, not to worry and not to make eye contact and she’d leave me alone; it was just Stabby. There was talk of the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on the beach, the weekly church sermon led by Jack the preacher (who is also a plumber), a potluck lasagna gathering.

Last year Ms. Kenneally created a trash fashion show/photo series for the Biennale in which she created couture designs out of trash collected from the beach, enlisted regulars in town to model the outfits, then photographed them. (She exhibited a similar series at this year’s festival as well.) The work was a way to showcase the people and the place. Jonathan Hart, a fireworks specialist who slept on the beach, posed like a gladiator; a woman who normally rode through town with a stuffed Kermit the Frog toy strapped to her bike was wrapped in a clear tarp and crown, looking like royalty emerging from the Salton Sea. The environment was harsh, the poses striking. Each frame straddled the line between glamour and destruction but also showcased a community’s pride in survival. Residents were undaunted by the armor of refuse; in fact, it made them stronger. The detritus, what outsiders might think of as garbage, became gorgeous. The landscape that is often described as apocalyptic became ethereal and magical. And that’s because it is.

On my second day, we went down to the docks at noon, and I found myself sitting on a floral mustard couch watching half a dozen or so people taking turns riding Jet Skis into the sun. The sun was hot, even though it was the cool season. Time felt elastic. Mr. Hart told me that he and some friends had fixed up the water scooters to give everyone in town the chance to blow off some steam, to smile a little. It had been a rough couple of months in the region. In preparation for Hurricane Hilary, which hit Mexico and the southwestern United States last August, 26 volunteers made 200 sandbags and delivered them door to door. Neighbors helped secure as many structures as possible.

Most media outlets reported that the hurricane was downgraded to a tropical storm because that’s the weather system that hit Los Angeles, but it was close to a hurricane in Bombay Beach, with winds hitting 60 miles per hour, and most properties were surrounded by water. Roofs collapsed or blew away entirely. “When faced with something like that, they were like, ‘Boom, we’re on it,’” Ms. Youngberg told me. They were together in disaster and in celebrating survival.

It reminded me of the writer Rebecca Solnit’s book “A Paradise Built in Hell,” which considers the upside to catastrophe. She finds that people rise to the occasion and oftentimes do it with joy because disaster and survival leave a wake of purposefulness, consequential work and community. Disasters require radical acts of imagination and interaction. It seemed that because Bombay Beach lived hard, surviving climate catastrophes like extreme weather on top of everyday extremes, it celebrated even harder. It seemed that in Bombay Beach there’s enough to celebrate if you just get through the day, gaze at the night sky and do it all again in the morning.

A lot of the residents who live there now arrived with trauma. Living there is its own trauma. But somehow the combination creates a place of care and physical and emotional presence. People experience life intensely, as one. It’s a town that is isolated, but in spite of a loneliness epidemic, it doesn’t seem so lonely to be there. I felt unexpected joy in what, from everything I’d read from afar, was a place that might as well have been sinking into the earth. I felt so safe and so happy that if we had sunk into the earth together, it wouldn’t have felt like such a bad way to go.

On my last night in Bombay Beach, I went to the Ski Inn, a bar that serves as the center of all social activity. I’d been in town for only two days, and yet it felt as if I’d been to the Ski Inn a million times, as if I already knew everyone and they knew me. A band was playing, we danced and drank, and I forgot about the 8 p.m. kitchen cutoff. The chef apologized, but he’d been working since 11:45 a.m. and had already cleaned the grill and fryer. He’d saved one mac and cheese for the bartender, and when she heard I hadn’t eaten, she offered to split it with me, not wanting me to go hungry or leave without having tried the mac and cheese.

Bombay Beach is a weird place. And this was an especially weird feeling. I had been instantly welcomed into the fold of community and cared for, even though I was a stranger in a very strange land.

I realized I didn’t want to leave. There were lessons there — how to live with joy and purpose in the face of certain catastrophe, how to exist in the present without the ever presence of doom. Next time, I thought, I’d stay longer, maybe forever, and actually ride a Jet Ski.

Jaime Lowe is a Knight-Wallace journalism fellow at the University of Michigan and the author of, most recently, “Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Lines of California’s Wildfires.” Nicholas Albrecht is a photographer based in Oakland, Calif. His first monograph, “One, No One and One Hundred Thousand,” was the culmination of a multiyear project made while living on the shores of the Salton Sea.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs faces sweeping sex-trafficking inquiry: What the feds have, need to prove

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Over the last few months, a legendary name in the music world has faced a series of shocking allegations of sexual abuse.

In civil lawsuits, four women have accused Sean “Diddy” Combs of rape, assault and other abuses, dating back three decades. One of the allegations involved a minor. The claims sent shock waves through the music industry and put Combs’ entertainment empire in jeopardy.

Now, the hip-hop mogul’s legal troubles have worsened considerably.

Law enforcement sources told The Times that Combs is the subject of a sweeping inquiry into sex-trafficking allegations that resulted in a federal raid Monday at his estates in Los Angeles and Miami.

Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’ L.A., Miami homes raided in sex-trafficking inquiry, sources say

Agents search Sean Combs’ Holmby Hills and Miami mansions as part of a federal inquiry into sex trafficking allegations, law enforcement sources said.

March 26, 2024

Authorities have declined to comment on the case, and Combs has not been charged with any crime. But the scene of dozens of Department of Homeland Security agents — guns drawn — searching Combs’ properties underscored the seriousness of the investigation.

At the same time as the raids, police in Miami arrested Brendan Paul, a man described in a recent lawsuit against Combs as a confidant and drug “mule.” Miami-Dade police took Paul, 25, into custody on suspicion of possession of cocaine and a controlled substance-laced candy, records show.

Paul was arrested at Miami Opa-Locka Executive Airport, where TMZ posted video showing Combs walking around Monday afternoon. An affidavit reviewed by the Miami Herald alleged that police working with Homeland Security found drugs in Paul’s bag. There is nothing in Miami court records connecting Combs to Paul, who was later released on $2,500 bail.

The arrest, however, is the latest in a string of legal woes tied to Combs.

Sources with knowledge of the sex-trafficking investigation into Combs, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said federal authorities have interviewed at least three women, but it’s unclear whether any are among those who have filed suit.

Behind the calamitous fall of hip-hop mogul Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs

In the wake of multiple lawsuits filed against him, former members of Combs’ inner circle told The Times that his alleged misconduct against women goes back decades.

Dec. 13, 2023

Legal experts say it could take time to build a criminal case against Combs but note that the civil suits could offer investigators a road map.

Dmitry Gorin, a former L.A. County sex-crimes prosecutor who is now in private practice, said the allegations in the lawsuits would likely have been enough for a judge to grant search warrants for Combs’ homes.

Investigators probably would seek authorization to “search for videos or photographs on any devices connected to the target ... anywhere where digital images can be found in connection to sexual conduct that would have been recorded,” Gorin said.

Shawn Holley, an attorney for Combs, did not respond to requests for comment, but Aaron Dyer, another of his lawyers, on Tuesday called the raids a “witch hunt” and “a gross overuse of military-level force.”

“Yesterday, there was a gross overuse of military-level force as search warrants were executed at Mr. Combs’ residences,” Dyer said in a statement. “This unprecedented ambush — paired with an advanced, coordinated media presence — leads to a premature rush to judgment of Mr. Combs and is nothing more than a witch hunt based on meritless accusations made in civil lawsuits. There has been no finding of criminal or civil liability with any of these allegations.”

Combs has previously denied any wrongdoing.

Gorin and other legal experts said investigators could be focused, in part, on the sexual assault allegations involving a minor. If a minor is moved across state lines for the purpose of sex, “that is enough for at least an argument ... of sex trafficking because somebody underage cannot consent,” Gorin said.

“Sex trafficking for adults usually involves some sort of coercion or other restraints,” he said, and can be tougher to prove. Prosecutors would need to show you “encouraged somebody to engage in sexual activity for money or some other inducement.”

Coercion, he added, is not limited to threats of violence. It could involve being held against one’s will or someone simply saying, “I don’t want to participate in group sex, and now I’m being forced to.”

Homeland Security investigates most sex-trafficking operations for the federal government. Legal experts say one possibility why the agency could be involved in this case is because the women involved in the allegations against Combs could be from other countries.

Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs sexual harassment suit includes notable music industry names

A new suit from music producer Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones makes new, explosive claims about Combs’ alleged assaults and misconduct in granular detail, naming several prominent artists and music executives as well.

Feb. 28, 2024

Meghan Blanco, a defense attorney who has handled sexual trafficking cases, said they can be “incredibly difficult cases to prove.”

“They have [in the Combs case] convinced one or more federal magistrates they had enough probable cause for one or more search warrants,” Blanco said. “Given the scope of the investigation, it seems they are further along than most investigations.”

Combs’ legal troubles have been building for months.

His former girlfriend, Casandra Ventura, the singer known as Cassie, accused him of rape and repeated physical assaults and said he forced her to have sex with male prostitutes in front of him. Joi Dickerson-Neal accused Combs in a suit of drugging and raping her in 1991, recording the attack and then distributing the footage without her consent.

Liza Gardner filed a third suit in which she claimed Combs and R&B singer Aaron Hall sexually assaulted her. Hall could not be reached for comment.

Another lawsuit alleges that Combs and former Bad Boy label president Harve Pierre gang-raped and sex-trafficked a 17-year-old girl. Pierre said in a statement that the allegations were “disgusting,” “false” and a “desperate attempt for financial gain.”

After the filing of the fourth suit, Combs wrote on Instagram: “Enough is enough. For the last couple of weeks, I have sat silently and watched people try to assassinate my character, destroy my reputation and my legacy. Sickening allegations have been made against me by individuals looking for a quick payday. Let me be absolutely clear: I did not do any of the awful things being alleged. I will fight for my name, my family and for the truth.”

Last month, producer Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones filed a federal lawsuit against Combs accusing him of sexually harassing and threatening him for more than a year. The suit includes mention of Paul in connection with “the affairs ... involving dealing in controlled substances.”

On Monday, the suit was amended to include Oscar winner Cuba Gooding Jr. as a co-defendant in the lawsuit.

Cuba Gooding Jr. added as co-defendant in Lil Rod’s lawsuit against Diddy

Cuba Gooding Jr. is added as a co-defendant in a lawsuit against Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs. Record producer Rodney ‘Lil Rod’ Jones accuses the actor of sexual assault.

Blanco said prosecutors “are going to look carefully for corroboration — the numbers of people accusing the person of similar acts.” Beyond that, they will be looking for videos, recordings and cellphone records that place people in the same locations or text messages or other discussions at the time of the alleged acts.

She said prosecutors are trying to build a record of incidents that happened some time ago.

Douglas Wigdor, a lawyer for Ventura and another, unnamed plaintiff, said in response to reports of the search warrant issued against Combs: “We will always support law enforcement when it seeks to prosecute those that have violated the law. Hopefully, this is the beginning of a process that will hold Mr. Combs responsible for his depraved conduct.”

Wigdor on Tuesday called his clients “courageous and credible witnesses.”

“To the extent there is a prosecution and they want our clients to testify truthfully,” he said, “I think they will and that will be damning evidence.”

The searches Monday in L.A. and Miami sparked worldwide attention.

Diddy’s ‘Love’ producer Lil Rod accuses him and associates of sexual assault, illicit behavior

Rodney ‘Lil Rod’ Jones has filed a bombshell lawsuit against Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs accusing the media mogul of sexually harassing and threatening him.

Feb. 27, 2024

His 17,000-square-foot Holmby Hills mansion, where Combs debuted his last album a year ago, was flooded with Homeland Security agents who gathered evidence on behalf of an investigation being run by the Southern District of New York, according to law enforcement officials familiar with the inquiry.

Two of Combs’ sons were briefly detained at the Holmby Hills property as agents searched the mansion in footage captured by FOX11 Los Angeles.

Both Blanco and Gorin said prosecutors will have to examine the accusers’ motives for coming forward and whether they are motivated by financial gain. They are sure to look for inconsistencies in any allegations, they said.

Any defense, Blanco added, will question why the accusers are only now coming forward and whether they have an incentive beyond justice.

“It comes down to credibility,” she said.

Times staff writers Stacy Perman and Nardine Saad contributed to this report.

More to Read

Diddy returns to Instagram, amid federal probe, to celebrate Easter with youngest daughter

April 1, 2024

Feds want Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’ communications, flight records in sex-trafficking probe

March 29, 2024

50 Cent denies Daphne Joy’s rape allegation after trolling her over mention in Diddy lawsuit

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Richard Winton is an investigative crime writer for the Los Angeles Times and part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2011. Known as @lacrimes on Twitter, during almost 30 years at The Times he also has been part of the breaking news staff that won Pulitzers in 1998, 2004 and 2016.

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SpaceX rocket set to launch tonight after delay. Here’s where and when