An artist may draw or paint with software, construct an image through code, work with photography or develop an interactive piece. The term describes a broad field of practice rather than a single movement or aesthetic. A digital work can be figurative, abstract, documentary or imaginative.
Digital art should be distinguished from the digitisation of an older artwork. A scan of a historical painting remains a record of that source work; its reproduction date does not replace the original artwork's date or attribution.
Characteristics
Digital art is defined by the significant use of digital technologies rather than by a single appearance. It can include algorithmic drawing, manipulated photography, animation, interactive installations, networked work and images generated through software. Early computer artists often worked with plotters and restricted processing resources; later practices use very different tools and forms of distribution.
A useful question is where the artistic decisions reside. They may be in a visible composition, a set of rules, a changing system or an interaction with the audience. Repetition and variation can reveal how a program operates, while other works conceal the computational process behind a seemingly familiar picture. Digital does not automatically mean artificial intelligence, and computer assistance does not eliminate authorship. Format, software dependencies, display and edition can all affect the work's identity. A print made from a digital source is a physical output of that image; it does not necessarily reproduce an interactive, moving or generative work in full.
Notable artists & makers
Vera Molnár — An early practitioner of rule-based and computer-generated visual experimentation.
Frieder Nake — A pioneer of algorithmic images produced with computer and plotter.
A. Michael Noll — An early experimenter in computer-generated visual compositions.
Notable works
Historical examples for context. Where a print is available in our collection, the work links to its product page.
(Des)Ordres, 1974 — Vera Molnár — A computer-art example exploring order and controlled variation.
Computer Composition with Lines, 1964 — A. Michael Noll — An early computer-generated composition built from linear elements.
Explore Digital Art in the collection
Historical art prints are modern reproductions. Dates and attributions describe the original artworks.
