15 Innovations That Have Defined Digital Art

Image via Complex Original

The GIF is the development that's generated the greatest impact of late, becoming a fundamental component of digital art, social media, and of promotions cycles, like the promotional materials Ryder Ripps created of MIA's third album. Perhaps the most adept of these artists goes under the name Mr Div. His work is incredible, a perfect exploitation of the constraints of the medium (limited color palette, low resolution) to create animated artworks that are truly stunning.

The GIF is a recursive loop that cannot be broken, or rather, the best ones enact this false reality. Steve White invented the Graphics Interchange Format in 1987. As higher quality formats came to prominence, the GIF was considered kitsch for sometime. That was until artists with a penchant for revisiting socially abandoned modes retreaded the format. The results are only gaining ground. Recently, a GIF by Rafaël Rozendall sold the Tumblr x Phillips "Paddles On!" acution for $1,300.

Some of us take video chatting for granted in the year 2013, where manufacturers stick webcams in anything that will hold one. But imagine how mind-blowing the invention was when it first appeared in the mid '90s. It was something Josh Harris realized the potential of almost immediately. Incredibly prescient, he founded a couple web sites that featured streaming video. But it was his two We Live In Public pieces that generated the most buzz. Both of these involved wiring spaces in which people lived for constant broadcasting of video on the Internet. The first was a kind of party den, a converted building in New York City that was the home of legendary parties in the late '90s, all broadcast live. The police eventually shut that down.

Harris' second We Live In Public project was another house wired up for live viewing. This time, though just he and his girlfriend lived there. That ended in calamity, as is chronicled in the 2009 documentary, also titled We Live In Public.

Today, the forum is more pointed but almost as durational. Take Molly Soda's Inbox Full. For eight hours, the artist read unread messages from her Tumblr inbox aloud to a camera. In comparison to someone such as Bruce Nauman, whose video art was of similar, if not more physically demanding repetition, this removes an elitist element, taken out of the gallery and onto the Web.

This is perhaps the greatest gift the digital sphere has given us. Without the limits of space, as much art can be collected in a piece or exhibition as one wants. There is no limit to a scroll, no space constraints for a curator. Just look at the huge list of collaborators and curators in the new show by THE WRONG. In a way, Kenny Goldsmith's Printing out the Internet is a rejection of this notion, or rather an inverse call to the possibilities of the Internet, the banality and waste of our digital space. Others just want to capitalize on this. Take Rafael Rozendaal's Paper Toilet, an infinitely unraveling roll of toilet paper. The possibilities are limitless.

Those who realized early on that all social media is performative began exploiting this as means to an artistic end. Every Facebook or Twitter user tools the information around them in order to put out a consistent (or inconsistent) product—an identiy.

In the realm of digital art, that's probably best realized by the New York City-based artist Ryder Ripps. In the case of Ripps, he made his entire Facebook available for download, as soon as timelines went live. This included every message he ever sent, up to Nov. 1, 2011. If this doesn't strike you as particularly artistic, you might look at the various websites of Mark Baumer. A poet-cum-conceptual artist, Baumer is an excellent example of the performance capabilities of social media, jamming his ideas of art and culture through Twitter and Tumblr into something critically provoking without being brash.

We're all about using the Internet to get off the Internet. And nothing has moved digital pathologies into material realms more than 3D printing. The new digitally-driven form of construction has led to not only some of the most intricate constructions we've seen in some time, such as the Digital Grotesque grotto by Michael Hansmeyer and Benjamin Dillenburger. 3D printers can also do insane replicas of works of art by the masters of their craft—Van Goghs in digital relief. An incredible, still-advancing digital technology.

Perhaps this seems like a less-potent aspect of digital art because it can go so largely unseen. All the code behind our websites and apps, beneath every Internet search and text message carries with it a huge amount of effort and code-which some artists love to disrupt. This can mean providing access to a random Facebook page or modifying the results of a search.

For example, artist Addie Wagenknecht earlier this year created GIRL vs. _root, a Google Chrome extension that changes the experience of web users to inverse the gender disparity in typically male-dominated websites. It replaced screen names with blatantly female ones and male-centric ads with more feminine ones.

At the same exhibition (God Mode Art Hack 2013, at 319 Scholes in Brooklyn) Olof Mathé, Chanpory Rith, and Dean Hunt presented Pantheon. This is the artist's statement: "Symmetrical backdoor browser access: When you opt into this piece, any new tab you open in Chrome will be opened as if you were another person. The catch, anyone else with the same browser plugin might be impersonating you via the new tabs they open."

Another case of manifesting the digital in the real world, laser cutting opens new avenues for translating designs only realized in digital, algorithmic environments. Often, these "digital fabrication studios" create some of the most mind blowing work you can imagine, particularly when the laser-cutting process takes as long as 30 hours. Take Eric Standley, for example, who creates thick, rich, textured paper sculptures from stained glass, made with a laser cutter.

Why has the Xbox Kinect become the motion sensor of choice for the digital creative class? Probably because of the insane amount of gear Microsoft manages to pack in the little casing: a video camera, a scanning infrared laser, an infrared camera, a motorized tilt mechanism, and a noise-canceling microphone. That's enough sensor hardware to equip a Lockheed U-2, and many digital artists haven't let this pass by them. Because USB drives the Xbox Kinect's connectivity, the possibilities are endless with such an easy-to-hack device. So there it is, appearing in numerous shows, in the work of Daniel Franke & Cedric Kiefer, supported by the likes of MomentFactory, and hacked to bits for works both on and off screen.

It seems old hat to us digital natives, but there was a time on the Web when everything looked like… well, just plain shit. Nowadays, bad Web design is as noticeable as a black eye, something any Web user ingests semiconsciously just by the amount of our time spent online. Good web design has become so common it almost passes right through us. It’s the truly exceptional—or, more likely, the truly awful—that causes us to stop and think.

In the case of digital artists, certain layouts become synonymous with the content contained therein, and that can be exploited to various means of commentary or politics. Take, for example, the homepage of Net Artist Daily, a website that chronicles the movements of various digital creators. Instead of simply creating their own layout, the developers aped that of The Huffington Post. Elsewhere, one Cooper Union student took the design of his university and satirized the page to protest tuition hikes at the school. Both of these are confounding, recursive, and perfectly representative of how ingrained web layout is digital art—the form is the content. 

The thing about the proliferation of technologies like Google Earth is the open source nature of overhead imagery. This provides a largely infinite portal of source imagery for artists and those working in appropriation. The work of Clement Valla, particularly "Postcards From Google Earth" immediately comes to mind. Valla scours the Google Earth for bridges and causeways. The imaging software can't handle these forms accurately, and the results are a bizarre window into a world that only half exists.

Elsewhere, photographer Mishka Henner stitches satellite imagery together into massive prints. In her series "Feedlots" Henner shows overhead views of the immense waste produced by Texas cattle farms, displayed only in the way that aerial photography can.

Tablets are the come-all, do-all of digital art. They can act as the production point, as the point of distribution, as a video screen, as the art object itself, an interactive portal, or as the subject of ridicule and commentary. The cover of James Ferraro's album Far Side Virtual comes to mind as one of the early examples of tablet as subject. More recently, Alexandra Gorczynski's Plur Piece, a digital print with two embedded tablets displaying videos made by the artist, sold at auction for $9,500 in late October.

There is nothing more fundamental to the practice of digital art than the smallest unit of separation on the screen: the pixel. While one avenue of digital art seeks to minimize the pixel's presence (the struggle to continually create higher and higher-resolution displays) there is a different kind of practice that draws attention to the tiny graphic unit. Take the sculptural art of Shawn Smith, whose 3D works are so dependent on the notion of the pixel that, when viewed from the front, they appear to flatten into 2D objects.

On the Web, the pixel is a different material, capable of drawing attention to certain aspects of a work that demands more and more "quality" out of computer displays. We are all familiar with the look and feel of 8-bit video games, and many some artists continue to play with that aesthetic. Take the work of Rod Hunt, whose pixel placement game is so on point it's almost unbelievable. This is painstaking work.

This kind of artwork has been around for decades, pioneered by Steve Beck, in the form of visual generators similar to audio synthesizers. They require no input from a camera to generate visual noise. Elsewhere, input singles and frame buffers can be distorted to create something wholly new. Whether this is realized in the disruption of chromakey, (such as in this Dasher video) recalling lenticular printing by over heaping the work with scan lines, or in the mind-bending abstractions of Danny Perez, this is a viable and evolving medium. Casey Reas' Americans! is a piece of software that scrambles video images from major networks into one glitching, jittery form and recently sold at auction for $11,000.

One of the early challenges of visual art created in the digital world was how to translate the gestural movements of the human anatomy to the code of computers. This includes the velocity of brushstrokes, the pressure of the hand, and the sensitivity of the medium. Thankfully, the graphics tablet was invented (the first one purportedly in 1888!), but it wasn't until sometime in the 1980s that these became functional and affordable for artists everywhere. The most mind-blowing thing about this innovation? Musician Todd Rundgren was the one to create the first color graphics tablet, something he later licensed to Apple.