Digital Art
Practices that treat the computer as material rather than tool, many of them imposing limits on polygons, file size or hardware and competing inside the boundary they chose.
Dictionary entry
- Net.art 1990s– / Style
Treats the browser, the link, the transmission error and the network itself as both the material and the site of the work.
- Low Poly 1990s– / revival / Technique
Leaves the few polygons and hard facet changes visible, using simplicity of form as the expression.
- Cracktro 1980s-1990s / Style
A short screen bolted to the front of cracked software as a group's calling card. An oversized group name, text scrolling without end and a run of greetings turned the home computer display into a stage.
- Generative Art 1965- / Technique
A way of working in which the maker writes only the rule and the randomness, leaving the drawing to the machine. As in Nees's plotter work, the result is shown as several variants born of one rule.
- Cyberfeminism 1991–2000s / Aesthetic
A movement the Australian collective VNS Matrix claimed for itself in 1991, and which the theorist Sadie Plant named independently in Britain at the same moment. Its manifesto travelled by fax, by mail, as a wheatpaste poster, as a billboard, and as an online post. Against a computer culture that wanted to leave the body behind, it put slime and sex back at the centre.
- DeepDream 2015– / Technique
Google's visualization technique repeatedly amplifies features learned by an image-recognition network, making eyes, animals and towers emerge excessively from clouds, rocks and leaves until misrecognition becomes a recursive hallucinatory surface.
- Blob World mid-2010s– / Style
A 3D illustration and motion style built from meticulously rendered soft masses, membranes, hair, and fluids. It makes tactility legible before object identity, placing corporate and music imagery between playfulness and unease.