The Philosophy of Digital Art

FAIN: FT-265181-19

Katherine Julia Thomson-Jones
Oberlin College (Oberlin, OH 44074-1057)

Writing two chapters for a book about the aesthetics of the production of art using digital technologies or displayed in digital media.

This project will fund the completion of a monograph, 'The Philosophy of Digital Art,' a philosophical investigation into the impact of digital technology on the visual arts. This investigation uses technical explanations of the production and presentation of digital image-based artworks to support a complex account of the nature of the digital. Such an account supports further arguments concerning the terms set by digital technology for full artistic appreciation. 'The Philosophy of Digital Art' is aimed at a broad scholarly audience in both the sciences and the humanities. It will provide a conceptual framework for ongoing interdisciplinary debate about the digital transformation of the art world.

Associated Products

Image in the Making: Digital Innovation and the Visual Arts (Book)
Title: Image in the Making: Digital Innovation and the Visual Arts
Author: Katherine Thomson-Jones
Abstract: Human beings have always made images, and to do so they have developed and refined an enormous range of artistic tools and materials. With the development of digital technology, the ways of making images - whether they are still or moving, 2D or 3D - have evolved at an unprecedented rate. At every stage of image making, artists now face a choice between using analog and using digital tools. Yet a digital image need not look digital; and likewise, a hand-made image or traditional photograph need not look analog. If we do not see the artist's choice between the analog and the digital, what difference can this choice make for our appreciation of images in the digital age? Image in the Making answers this question by accounting for the fundamental distinction between the analog and the digital; by explicating the technological realization of this distinction in image-making practice; and by exploring the creative possibilities that are distinctive of the digital. Katherine Thomson-Jones makes the case for a new kind of appreciation in the digital age. In appreciating the images involved in every digital art form - from digital video installation to net art to digital cinema - there is a basic truth that we cannot ignore: The nature and technology of the digital expands both what an image can be as an image and what an image can be for us as human beings.
Year: 2021
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0197567616
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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