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The Evolution of Digital Art

May 19th, 2011

Until the late 20th century, the graphic-design medium had been based on handicraft processes: layouts that were stylised by hand in order to create a design; type was specified and ordered from a typesetter; and type proofs and photostats of images were assembled in position on heavy paper or board for photo copying and platemaking. During the 1980s and early ’90s, however, rapid changes in digital computer hardware and software utterly altered graphic design.

Software for Apple’s 1984 Macintosh computer, such as the MacPaint programme developed by computer programmer Bill Atkinson and graphic designer Susan Kare, had a majorly revolutionary human interface. Tool icons controlled by a mouse or graphics tablet allowed designers and artists to use computer graphics in an intuitive manner. The Postscript™ page-description language from Adobe Systems, Inc., enabled pages of type and graphics to be placed into graphic designs on screen. By the mid-1990s, the transition of graphic design from a drafting-table action to an on-screen computer action was basically complete.

Personal computers placed typesetting tools into the homes of designers, and thence a period of experimentation began in the design of new and unusual fonts and page layouts. Type and images were layered, fragmented, and dismembered; type columns were overlapped and run at very long or short line lengths, and the sizes, weights, and fonts were changed within single headlines, columns, and words. Much of this type of research happened in design training at art schools and universities. American designer David Carson, art director of Beach Culture magazine in 1989-91, Surfer in 1991-92, and Ray Gun magazine in 1992-96, caught the imagination of a youthful audience by taking such an experimental approach into publication design.

Fast growth in onscreen software also enabled designers to make elements transparent; to stretch, scale, and bend them; to layer type and graphics in mid-space; and to blend imagery into complex montages. For example, in a United States postage stamp from 1998, designers Ethel Kessler and Greg Berger digitally montaged John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Frederick Law Olmsted with a photograph of New York’s Central Park, a site plan, and botanical art to commemorate the landscape architect. Interwoven, these images evoke a rich expression of Olmsted’s life and work.

The electronic transition in graphic design was shortly followed by public access to the internet. A whole new operation of graphic-design activity bloomed in the mid-1990s when Internet business became a fast growing sector of the world-wide economy, causing organisations and businesses to quickly establish Web sites. Designing a website involves layout of screens of information rather than of physical pages, but approaches to the use of type, images, and colour are similar to those used for print. Web design, however, requires a host of new considerations, including designing for navigation around the website and for using hypertext links to jump to additional information. An example of strong Web design is the Herman Miller for the Home Web site, designed by BBK Studio in 1998. These designers developed a purposeful visual identity, effective navigation, and informational clarity. Attributes that added to the effectiveness of this Web site included a consistent colour palette, an informative use of pictures of products, and a scrolling montage of products.

Because of the universal appeal and reach of the internet, the graphic-design profession is becoming increasingly global in scope. Additionally, the merging of motion graphics, animation, video feeds, and music into Web-site design has caused the merging of traditional print and broadcast media. As kinetic media expand from motion pictures and basic television to scores of cable-television channels, video games, and animated Web sites, motion graphics are becoming an increasingly important area of graphic design.

In the 21st century, graphic design is far-reaching; it is a major component of the complex print and electronic information systems. It permeates modern society, delivering information, product identification, entertainment, and persuasive messages. The ongoing advancing of technology has dramatically changed the way graphic designs are created and distributed to a mass audience. However, the essential role of the graphic designer, providing expressive form and clarity of content to communicative messages, remains the same.

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What is Sculpture?

October 12th, 2010

Sculpture is an artistic form in which hard or plastic materials are molded into 3D objects. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments that range from tableaux to contexts surrounding the spectator. A huge variety of material can be used, including clay, wax, stone, metal, fabric, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random “found” objects. Materials will be carved, modeled, molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn, assembled, or otherwise shaped and combined.

Sculpture is not a fixed branding that applies to a permanently circumscribed category of objects or sets of activities. It is, rather, an art that is growing and changes and is continually extending the range of forms and evolving new styles of objects. The definition of the term grew much wider in the second half of the 20th century than it had been merely two or three decades prior, and in the evolving state of visual art at the dawn of the 21st century, nobody can predict what its future dimensions are likely to be.

Certain features which in previous centuries were considered essential to the sculpturing art but are not present in a large part of modern sculpture and thus no longer form part of its definition. One of the most elementary points of these is representation. Before the 20th century, sculpture was considered to be a representational art; an imitation of forms in life, most often human figures but also inanimate objects, including game, utensils, and books. At the turn of the 20th century, however, sculpture also began to include nonrepresentational forms. It has long been accepted that the forms of such functional 3D objects as furniture, pots, and buildings might be expressive and beautiful without being representational. It was only from the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, three-D works of art began to be an art form in and of themselves.

Prior to the 20th century, sculpture was regarded as essentially an art of solid form, or mass. Whilte the negative elements of sculpture — the voids and hollows within and between its solid forms — have usually been to some degree an intricate part of the design, but the role was blatantly secondary. In a large area of modern sculpture, however, the attention has broadened, and the spatial elements have come out as dominant. Spatial sculpture is now a commonly acknowledged field of sculpture.

It was also taken for granted in the sculpture of the past that its components were of a constant shape and size and, excepting works such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (a monumental weather vane), did not move. With recent developements of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its design can any longer be regarded as inherent to defining the art.

Finally, sculpture in the 20th century was no longer limited to the two traditional forming procedures of carving and modeling, or to such traditional natural materials as stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. As today’s sculptors can use any materials and methods of manufacture that will serve their purposes, the art of sculpture can no longer be identified by any particular kind of materials or techniques.

After all this evolution, there is probably only one area that stays constant in sculpture, and it emerges as the key abiding concern of sculptors: the art is a branch of the visual arts that is particularly concerned with the creation of works in three-D.

Sculpture should be either in the round or in relief. A sculpture in the round consists of a separate, detached piece in its own right, with the same kind of independent existence in reality as a human body or a chair. A relief does not have this reality. It is part of and projects from or is an integral part of something else that might serve either as a background for it or a matrix from which it emerges.

The actual 3-D nature of sculpture in the round limits its scope in certain respects in comparison with the scope of painting. Sculpture will not conjure the illusion of space from solely optical means, or invest its shape with atmosphere and light as we might see in painting. However, sculpture does proffer a realistic experience, a vivid physical presence that is simply denied in the pictorial arts. Sculpture can be tangible as well as visible, and they may appeal strongly and directly to the tactile and visual sensibilities. Even the visually impaired, including those who are congenitally blind, can create and appreciate certain sorts of sculpture. It was, in fact, stated by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be considered as elementarily an art of touch and that the first roots of sculptural forms can be based on the pleasure we experience in doing this.

All three-dimensional forms are seen as possessing an expressive character along with their solely geometric properties. They come across to the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and so forth. By exploiting the expressive qualities of form, artists are able to create visual imagery in which subject matter and expressiveness mutually reinforce each other. This imagery can go beyond the pure presentation of fact and imply a near endless range of subtle and powerful feelings.

The aesthetic raw material used for sculpture is, so to speak, the whole realm of expressive 3-D form. A sculpture can draw upon what we see exists in the endless variety of natural and man-made form, or it can be an art of genuine invention. It has been mastered to express a wide range of human emotions and feelings from the gently tender and delicate to the most violent and ecstatic.

All human beings, innately involved from birth with the world of three-D form, realise something of its structural and expressive elements and will have emotional responses to them. This combination of intellectual understanding and sensitivity, also known as a sense of form, is able to be cultivated and refined. It is to this sense of form that this art primarily appeals.

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