In the 20th century, traditional visual arts, based on manual production processes, were gradually joined by art that focuses on conceptual processes and seeks to return them to a physical, material but also electronic form. Marcel Duchamp inaugurated a conceptual direction that would become dominant in contemporary art, shifting the focus from creating material works to visualizing mental processes.
Where Conceptual Art in the 1960s sought to represent abstract concepts in physical works, electronic art has been exploring the immaterial dimension of art for decades. Since the 1970s, art forms using electronic technologies have been spreading, soon to result in digital technologies. Philosopher J. F. Lyotard organized the exhibition “Les Immatériaux” in Paris in 1985, which investigated the relationship between art and technology.
Ubiqua, the first planetary art network, set up in 1986 at the Venice Biennale, was a moment of reflection on the early developments of what is now called digital art. Gualtiero and Roberto Carraro, participating in the Ubiqua exhibition with other artists, shared their research on the logic of digital image generation online. In those years, when the world wide web did not yet exist, artists were just beginning to investigate the artistic nature of digital processes, such as iconic interfaces, hypertexts, and image generation through AI.
Digital art includes computer art, multimedia art,” net art, immersive installation, virtual reality, and the metaverse, with recent developments of NFTs, (Non-Fungible Tokens) that use block chain technology to guarantee the uniqueness and ownership of a digital asset. With works such as Beeple’s Everydays, sold by Christie’s auction house in 2021, NFT art has entered the market forcefully, but questions remain about the artistic value and role of the artist. The NFT market, once the center of this transformation, has since seen rapid decline. Moreover, the intangible limitations of digital art have always restricted its market to a few collectors. Many digital artists, such as the American Bill Viola, or the Italians of Studio Azzurro, have focused their activities in public spaces, favoring institutions over galleries and private collectors. This public dimension of digital art, in immersive “onsite” installations or in online metaverses, is an important feature that needs to be considered if we try to imagine a new positioning of contemporary art in the age of Homo extensus.
Italiano