digital art essay question

Digital Art: 14 Answers to Your Most Common Questions

Digital art is a growing industry and is attracting a lot of creative individuals with a passion for art. Digital art has evolved to great lengths with newer software, tools, and discussions.

If you are looking to become a digital artist yourself you should know what this field is all about.

That is why I compiled some questions upcoming digital artists are asking. Below are 14 of the most common digital art questions answered with relevant links for more information.

Table of Contents

1. Is Digital Art “Real” Art?

Yes . Digital art is “real” art despite what many people might tell you.

Traditional artists say that digital art isn’t real art as they state the computer just does everything for them .

They are wrong and the reason for this is their lack of understanding of how digital artists create their artworks using digital tools and software.

Digital software and computers are just tools used to create art. You have to know how to use these tools in order to create good art and that takes time and effort.

Basically what I’m trying to say is: If you give a hammer to a plumber he won’t know what to do with it –If you give it to a carpenter, he’ll make something beautiful out of it.

The same applies to digital artists.

I have a detailed article on digital art and real art which you can check out here . It goes over the whole argument and what traditional and digital artists have to say about it.

2. Is Digital Art Easier than Traditional Art?

If you ask digital artists they’ll say digital art is easier. But, if you ask traditional artists they’ll say traditional art is easier.

As a person who has experience in both, I feel that Digital art is way easier than traditional art .

Firstly, you won’t be bound to certain conditions when painting digitally. Things such as, the paint being too wet/dry, brushes getting damaged, canvas roughing up the paints, etc.

Secondly, you won’t have to worry too much about things such as, color, composition, references, shading, etc.

Because, the computer takes care of it.

Working digital comes with color, contrast and brightness corrections, layout and composition tools, online reference material, custom brushes, gradients, etc. The examples are endless.

Finally, it is so much more convenient .

It allows you to undo your mistakes, fill up large spaces with the click of a button, effortlessly create collages, and create templates for later use.

These are some of the reasons I think digital art is easier than traditional art.

However, it should be noted that digital art itself isn’t easy. There are a lot of things to learn – Photoshop alone has around 70 different tools and many experts even don’t know what some of them do!

3. Do I Need a lot of Money to Start Digital Art?

It might be overwhelming for most beginners trying to get in the field of digital art. There are many gadgets you might see digital artists use such as, a graphics tablet, high-performance computers, and a quality desk set-up.

Fortunately, you don’t need any of that to start digital art.

Sure, they’ll improve your workflow, make you more productive, and let you create high-quality art but it’s not necessary.

However, this also depends on which area of digital art you’re going to be focusing on.

There are many fields in digital art such as, animation, painting, graphic design, web design, etc.

Some niches might require you to have a display drawing tablet, PC, and good education (which can also be expensive).

If you want more information on this topic – check out these articles I’ve written to know whether or not you would need to invest a lot of money in your digital art niche:

• Do you need to know how to draw to be an animator?
• Do you need a good PC to start digital art?

The above relevant articles would definitely clear up any confusion you may have.

4. Do I Need a Computer for Digital Art?

It is possible for some artists to create beautiful digital art without a computer. However, if you want to become a professional digital artist I would recommend you buy yourself a good quality computer .

This is because you will have very limited options in digital art if you are working without a computer . You won’t have access to a lot of resources, you might not be able to effectively market you’re art, and you won’t be able to run the most basic digital art software.

If you’re just starting out I would recommend you buy a cheap laptop that can run the industry-standard software .

Later in your career, you can upgrade to a newer, better computer such as an iMac or even an iPad Pro (which is becoming increasingly popular amongst digital artists).

5. Can I Do Digital Art on My Phone?

Yes . It is 100% possible to do digital art on your phone using drawing/painting apps . There are many apps on the Google Play/Apple store that allows you to create beautiful pieces of art using only your phone.

Some popular drawing apps on mobile are:

• Adobe Photoshop Sketch (Free)
• Adobe Illustrator Draw (Free)
• Autodesk Sketchbook (Free)
• Art Studio Pro (Paid – IOS only)
• MediBang Paint (Paid – IOS only)

You can download any of the above apps and start drawing on your phone. Personally, I would recommend you start with the free apps to get a feel for the apps.

6. Can I Draw Using My Fingers?

Yes . It is possible to draw on your phone using your fingers.

However, this takes a lot of practice and skill. Also the app you are using to draw should be able to keep your strokes nice and consistent.

Using your fingers is extremely difficult as you don’t have much control over your lines. I’d recommend you use a pen/stylus but, if you want to use your fingers to create some good art – it’s hard but not impossible. Who knows maybe you’ll discover your unique art style.

7. What Equipment Do Digital Artists Use?

Digital artists use a number of different gadgets, devices, tools, and software. However, it depends mostly on what niche you are working in.

Most digital artists commonly have the following equipment for their work:

• Drawing/graphics tablet
• Drawing software 3D/2D
• Good education such as, courses, books, YouTube videos etc.
• Color-accurate monitor
• Powerful computer
• High-quality keyboard and mouse
• Ergonomic chair

You might not need these exact things to become a digital artist as it depends on your style.

For example, if you are just going to be making simple digital paintings to showcase your talent, you might just need a cheap drawing tablet and a laptop.

But, if you are a full-time animator you might need an industry-standard drawing tablet as well as the above things to produce high-quality animations consistently.

8. How Do Digital Artists Make Money?

There are mainly 2 ways digital artists make money.

Doing commissioned work or being their own boss .

Commissioned work includes creating digital art for clients such as, business cards, greeting cards, custom artwork, company animations, etc.

When you are your own boss you have multiple options to make money as a digital artist:

• Becoming a YouTuber – Many digital artists make good money from their YouTube channel. There are many niches you can tap into as a YouTuber e.g. story time animation, tutorials, industry advice, graphic design, web design, etc. The possibilities are endless.
• Selling online templates – You can create templates for websites or videos to be sold in online marketplaces. This is a common side hustle for most digital artists.
• Freelancing – As a freelancer you can register yourself as a digital artist and market yourself on marketplaces such as, UpWork  and Fiverr . As a freelancer you offer your services to clients who may need them. They hire you for a job, you deliver the work, and get paid.

These are just some ways to give you an idea on how digital artists make money.

For more details, I go through 11 ways to monetize your digital art here .

9. Are Digital Art and Graphic Design The Same?

No . Even though digital art and graphic design are somewhat related they aren’t the same thing .

Digital artists create art whereas graphic designers use typography, color, composition, and images to communicate a message.

Also, graphic design also involves a lot of static design such as, poster and book design. Digital art is fully digital and has nothing to do with print.

10. Is Digital Art Cheating?

No . Digital art isn’t cheating it’s just more efficient than traditional art .

Many traditional artists call digital art cheating because they state that the software does everything for them. This is not true as digital artists still have to learn the fundamentals of art such as, color, composition, perspective, and line.

Just like traditional art, digital artists also have to create artworks from scratch. You aren’t given a cookie-cutter template to help you in making an original piece of art.

11. What Software Do Digital Artists Use?

Digital artists use a range of different software as it depends on their niche.

For example, as an animator you might need software for drawing, animating, audio, and editing. As a digital painter however, you might just need a digital painting program such as Photoshop.

Here are some of the most commonly used software by digital artists:

• Adobe Creative Cloud (Suite of Adobe Creative apps)
• Affinity Software Suite (Suite of Affinity Creative apps)
• Krita (Free alternative to Photoshop)
• Gimp (Free alternative to Photoshop)
• Blender (2D/3D animation software)
• Maya (3D animation software)
• Procreate (iPad only digital art software)

These are some of the most popular ones. Of course there are many more that digital artists tend to use.

12. Can I Draw Without a Graphics/Drawing Tablet?

Yes . It is possible to draw without a graphics/drawing tablet . If you are working on a computer, you can use the pen tool, line tool, shape tool, or pencil tool to draw digitally.

Modern digital art applications such as, Adobe Illustrator, have the ability to auto-adjust your strokes. This means they will use A.I. to make your lines smoother helping you draw more accurately.

If you are on mobile it is best to use a pen/stylus and as noted above you can also use your fingers.

If you plan on making more detailed artworks, want to be more efficient, or are working professionally you might definitely need to consider buying a good quality tablet.

It also depends on your niche. As an animator, you would definitely need a graphics tablet but, you might not need one if you are just creating simple explainer videos.

If you want to know more on this topic and see which niche you would need a tablet for – check out this article .

13. Can I Draw Without a Pen/Stylus?

Yes. It is possible to do digital art on your smartphone without a pen/stylus. You can use your fingers to draw or a tablet!

Yes, that’s right, some Wacom tablets such as the Wacom Intuos , Wacom One, and One by Wacom come with smartphone compatibility. Unfortunately, if you are an iPhone user it’s not possible to connect this tab to your smartphone device.

However, XP-Pen managed to make a tablet that is compatible with IOS called the Note Plus Smart Notepad. These are however pretty rare.

You can buy a graphics tablet and plug it into your mobile device and start creating without a pen/stylus.

You can check out my beginner’s guide to buying a drawing tablet if you are thinking to buy one.

14. What Are Digital Art NFTs?

NFTs or non-fungible tokens are “ digital assets that [represent] real-world objects like art, music, in-game items and videos ”.

NFTs provide new ways for digital artists to secure their art and make money from it.

NFTs are used as a way to buy and sell digital art but this isn’t as simple as transferring a PNG or JPG file to a person. NFTs are created using blockchain technology .

A blockchain is a collection of blocks that store unique information . These blocks are used to create, sell, and trade NFTs. Since they include information unique to the art piece – it helps ensure that the piece be protected and not copied.

Each block is then assigned a hash which is a secret PIN code used to access the NFT.

You can see this detailed article by the AMT lab which goes over everything you need to know about NFTs.

This artcle showed you 14 things you should know before starting digital art . This would have hopefully cleared up any confusions or doubts you may have had regarding digital art. I hope the above links provided you with a clear explanation of the questions.

If you have any other questions I may have missed out, ask them in the comments below!

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The Philosophy of Digital Art

The philosophy of digital art is the philosophical study of art that crucially relies on computer processing in its production or presentation. There are many kinds of digital art, including digital cinema and video, digital photography and painting, electronic music, literary works generated by so-called “chatbots”, NFT art, net art, and video games. For the full range of digital art kinds, the aim is to identify their essential features, ground their proper appreciation, and situate our understanding of them in relation to pre-existing debates in aesthetics. This first-order inquiry cannot proceed without acknowledgment of the enormous interdisciplinary and popular interest in digital media. Claims are frequently made about fundamental shifts in the way we classify, evaluate, and engage with art now that computers seem to be involved in every kind of cultural production. The so-called “digital condition” (Kittler 1999) is characterized by a loss of trust in the image, a new way of experiencing the world as indeterminate and fragmentary, and a breakdown of traditional boundaries between artist and audience, artwork and artistic process. If we are looking for evidence of the digital condition, we need to understand its conceptual structure. Here’s where the philosopher comes in.

Although technology-based art is viewed as the “final avant-garde of the twentieth-century” (Rush 2005), and digital art has been part of the mainstream art world since the late 1990s (Paul 2008), the philosophy of digital art is still an emerging subfield. Three seminal monographs, one on videogames (Tavinor 2009), one on digital cinema (Gaut 2010), and one on computer art (Lopes 2010), have been invaluable in laying the groundwork concerning philosophical questions about art and computer technology. Since these publications, further philosophical attention has been given to the digital arts, including the first published volume to focus on the aesthetics of videogames (see Robson & Tavinor, eds., 2018). It can be challenging for philosophers to keep up with the rapid rate at which digital technology develops. But a number of recent articles on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the arts show that philosophers are well aware of and ready to meet this challenge (Atencia-Linares and Artiga 2022; Millière 2022; Moruzzi 2022; Roberts and Krueger 2022). The body of philosophical work on AI art will no doubt continue to grow, as will bodies of work on virtual reality in art and Internet art. With this growth, we can expect to to learn a great deal more about the extent and character of the digital cultural revolution.

1.1 The Digital Art World

1.2 the analog-digital distinction, 1.3 digital art: production, 1.4 digital art: presentation, 2. digital images, 3. appreciating artworks in digital media, 4.1 defining interactive works, 4.2 display variability, 4.3 interactivity and creativity, 5. locative art, other internet resources, related entries, 1. what is digital art.

In its broadest extant sense, “digital art” refers to art that relies on computer-based digital encoding, or on the electronic storage and processing of information in different formats—text, numbers, images, sounds—in a common binary code. The ways in which art-making can incorporate computer-based digital encoding are extremely diverse. A digital photograph may be the product of a manipulated sample of visual information captured with a digital camera from a “live” scene or captured with a scanner from a traditional celluloid photograph. Music can be recorded and then manipulated digitally or created digitally with specialized computer software. And a film is now the product of an extremely complex sequence of choices between analog and digital processes at the stages of image and sound capture or composition, image and sound editing, color correction or sound mastering, special effects production, and display or projection.

The complexity of the digital cinema workflow draws attention to a further difference concerning whether reliance on the digital is restricted to the way an artwork is made or extends to the display of the work. A work may be made on a computer—say, a musical work composed with Sibelius or a play written in Microsoft Word—and yet meant for apprehension in a non-digital format—say, performance on traditional musical instruments or enactment on stage. Similarly, a film could be captured and edited digitally before being printed on traditional 35mm photochemical film for projection in theaters. By contrast, works that are purely digital include a film made and projected digitally—for example, Dune (2021), a piece of music composed and played back electronically—for example, the electroacoustic works of Gottfried Michael Koenig (see Other Internet Resources ), and a work of ASCII art—an image made up from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII standard of 1963 and displayed on a computer monitor.

An example of ASCII art:

More recent kinds of purely digital art include Instagram art and Chatbot fiction. An example of the former is Land of Arca (2023), which is made up of narrative images created by AI and then curated by the Instagram account’s owner, IRK. An example of the latter is any of the myriad science fiction short stories with which several literary magazines were recently deluged.

Each of the examples above incorporates a computational process, to some degree, in the presentation of the work. In many ways, works belonging to digital media stand in stark contrast to those made by completely analog means.

The classical account of the analog-digital distinction is found in Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art (1976). In fact Goodman’s account remains practically the only general account of the distinction. While David Lewis (1971) raises a series of objections to Goodman, Lewis’ alternative account applies only to the representation of numbers. And while John Haugeland (1981) returns to the general distinction, he effectively qualifies and re-frames Goodman’s account in order to overcome Lewis’s and other potential objections. A few philosophers interested in clarifying the concepts employed by cognitive scientists have recognized the need for a general account of the analog-digital distinction (e.g., Dretske 1981; Blachowicz 1997; Katz 2008; Maley 2011). But in this context, as well, Goodman’s account is the essential point of reference. In some ways, this is surprising or at least striking: As Haugeland points out, the digital is a “mundane engineering notion” (1981: 217). Yet the philosophical context in which the notion receives its fullest analysis is that of aesthetics. As is well-known, Goodman’s interests in this context center on the role of musical notation in fixing the identity of musical works. But a musical notation is also a standard example of a digital system.

On Goodman’s broad, structuralist way of thinking, representational systems in general consist of sets of possible physical objects that count as token representations. Objects are grouped under syntactic and semantic types, and interesting differences between kinds of representational system track differences in the way syntactic and semantic types relate to one another. Digital systems are distinguished by being differentiated as opposed to dense . The condition of syntactic differentiation is met when the differences between classes of token representations are limited such that it is possible for users of the system always to tell that a token belongs to at most one class. The condition of semantic differentiation is met when the extension of each type, or the class of referents corresponding to a class of token representations, differs in limited ways from the extension of any other type; so that users of the system can always tell that a referent belongs to at most one extension. Goodman provides the following example of a simple digital computer, a system that meets the conditions of both syntactic and semantic differentiation: Say we have an instrument reporting on the number of dimes dropped into a toy bank with a capacity for holding 50 dimes, where the count is reported by an Arabic numeral on a small display (Goodman 1976: 159). In this system, the syntactic types are just the numbers 0–50, which have as their instances the discrete displays, at different times, of the corresponding Arabic numerals. Both the conditions of syntactic and semantic differentiation are met because the relevant differences between instances of different numbers are both highly circumscribed and conspicuous. This means that users of the system can be expected to be able to read the display, or determine which number is instantiated on the display (syntactic differentiation) and which numerical value, or how many coins, is thereby being indicated (semantic differentiation).

Analog representation fails to be differentiated because it is dense. With an ordering of types such that between any two types, there is a third, it is impossible to determine instantiation of at most one type. Not every case involving a failure of finite differentiation is a case of density but, in practice, most are. With a traditional thermometer, for example, heights of mercury that differ to any degree count as distinct syntactic types and the kinds of things that can differ semantically. Similarly, for pictures distinguished according to regions of color, for any two pictures, no matter how closely similar, one can always find a third more similar to each of them than they are to each other. Density is a feature of any system that measures continuously varying values. That is, as long as the system in question is designed so that any difference in magnitude indicates a difference in type.

Returning to the digital, some commentators have questioned whether Goodman’s condition of (syntactic and semantic) finite differentiation is sufficient to distinguish the kind of representation in question (Haugeland 1981; Lewis 1971). John Haugeland, for example, argues that there can be differentiated schemes without the “copyability” feature that defines the practical significance of digital systems. Haugeland’s solution is to require the practical and not just the theoretical possibility of a system’s users determining type membership. In fact, however, Goodman himself would likely accept this modification. In a later work, Goodman explicitly states that finite differentiation must make it possible to determine type membership “by means available and appropriate to the given user of the given scheme” (Goodman and Elgin 1988: 125).

Whether or not a work of digital art is a work of representational art, and even with the most abstract works of digital art, there are layers of representation involved in the complex processes of their production and presentation. Most of these layers, and arguably the most important ones, are digital. Where there are analog systems involved, digital translation makes possible the realization of the values of the final work. This is perhaps best seen with paradigmatic cases of digital art. Consider the following two relatively early works:

• Craig Kalpakjian, Corridor , 1995. Computer-generated animation on laser video disc, in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The video leads us slowly down an empty office hallway that is slightly curved and evenly lit, with pale, blank walls and opaque glass windows.
• Cory Arcangel and Paul B. Davis, Landscape Study #4 , 2002. Installation. A “reverse-engineered” video game that aims to transpose our everyday surroundings onto a video game platform. The work “plays” on a Nintendo gaming system and displays a continuously scrolling landscape with the blocky, minimalist graphics of the Mario Bros. game.

The first of these works involves digital moving imagery that is entirely generated by a computer program. At the same time, the video looks like it was or could have been recorded in an actual office setting. The particular significance of the work depends on the viewer being aware of its digital composition while at the same time being struck by its photorealistic familiarity. According to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF MoMA),

Kalpakjian thus reveals the complete artificiality of the built environments we inhabit, and their aesthetic distance from more humanistic forms. (SF MoMA n.d.)

The second work involves imagery that was initially captured digitally. Arcangel & Davis began by taking 360-degree photographs of Buffalo, New York. They scanned and modified the photographs on their computer so that the images could be coded according to the graphics capabilities of the Nintendo gaming system, and in order to give the images the distinctive look and feel of the Mario Bros. game. Arcangel & Davis then programmed the landscape imagery to scroll continuously across a TV screen, as in the Mario Bros. game. Finally, Arcangel & Davis melted the chips in a Super Mario cartridge, replacing them with their self-manufactured chips so that their landscape “game” could be run on any Nintendo system. As well as all the ways in which Arcangel & Davis’s work relies on both the technology and aesthetics of videogames, there are clearly ways in which it deliberately removes or blocks certain key features or capacities of videogames, perhaps most notably their robust interactivity. Playing a videogame essentially involves the prescribed creation of new display instances of a work. But we do not “play” Landscape Study #4 , and its imagery is fixed by the artist. The kind of interactivity typical of videogames can also be found in artworks made without computers (see Lopes 2010: 49). But this type of interactivity is most closely associated with digital art because complex interactivity is so much easier to achieve with the use of computers. This suggests a high degree of self-consciousness in Arcangel & Davis’s decision to block the interactivity of their reverse-engineered videogame. From the perspective of the philosophy of digital art, such a decision highlights the need for further discussion of the link between the nature of the digital and the nature of interactivity.

What is it about the ways in which the works by Arcangel & Davis, and by Kalpakjian, are produced that makes them digital in an appreciatively relevant sense? Computer imaging depends on the inherent programmability and automation of digital computers. Digital image capture depends on sampling and subsequently on the near-instantaneous processes of discrete coding. None of this would be possible without a series of linked systems each with finitely differentiated settings.

At the most basic level, the myriad transistors in a computer are essentially tiny digital schemes, each with two types: the “on” and “off” settings of the transistor-capacitor switch. The settings are discrete and distinguishable, as are their compliance classes, of 1s and 0s. The ubiquity of binary code in computer processing is a consequence of the fact that a digital computer is essentially a vast collection of on-off switches. A particular sequence of 1s and 0s realized at a particular time in virtue of the requisite arrangement of transistors is a binary instance of a particular number, interchangeable with all other instances of the same number and not interchangeable with any instances of different numbers. The difference between instances of one number and instances of other numbers is strictly limited to the difference in the ordering of 1s and 0s. In other words, Goodman’s condition of finite differentiation is clearly met. In turn, the numbers can refer to other values, including the light-intensity values of an image. A computation simply involves the generation of output strings of binary digits from input strings, in accordance with a general rule that depends on the properties of the strings (Piccinini 2008). The modern (digital) computer encodes both input data and assembly languages as sequences of binary digits, or bits, and allows for the internal storage of instructions. This makes the computer essentially programmable in the sense that it can be modified to compute new functions simply by being fed an appropriate arrangement of bits.

A program is a list of instructions, and instructions are strings of digits. The modern digital computer has components that serve to copy and store programs inside the machine, and to supply instructions to the computer’s processing units for implementation in the appropriate order. The outputs of a system can be dependent on specific inputs often in tandem with the conditional if-then statements. This is what is involved in a computer executing conditional branching instructions such that it can monitor and respond to its own intermediate computational states and even modify instructions based on its own processes. Such modifications are dictated by an algorithm—the program’s set of rules and operations. It is the digital computer’s capacity for branching, due to its digital programmability, that allows for the kinds of higher-level automation involved in the use of imaging applications and sequential image-generation. Our artists, Kalpakjian, and Arcangel & Davis, do not have to enter the strings of digits for every basic operation of the computer that underlies the complex operations involved in describing and manipulating images. If they did have to do this, they would never finish making their artworks. Rather, artists can rely on open-source code, libraries, or commercial software that automatically and instantaneously supplies the lines of code required for the execution of their artistic decisions.

The imaging software with which Kalpakjian works allows him to generate architectural interiors in rich detail. Arcangel & Davis do not require as much from their imaging software given that they are manipulating previously captured and scanned images. The process of scanning the photographs, just like the process involved in digital photography, involves sampling and quantization of a visual source; assigning an integer, from a finite range, to the average light-intensity measured across each small area of source-space corresponding to a cell in a grid. This process involves averaging and rounding up values, and it involves measurement, or sampling, of light intensities at (spatially and temporally) discrete intervals. Some, indeed many, of the differences in light intensity across the source image or scene (and at different times, in the case of moving imagery) are thereby dropped by the process of digital image-capture. Among some media theorists, this fact has led to deep suspicion of the digitally recorded image, prompting the feeling that the digital image is always a poor substitute for the analog. Current digital technologies for image-capture and display have such high rates of sampling frequency and resolution that the values dropped in quantization are well below the threshold of human perception. At the same time, Arcangel & Davis’s Landscape Study #4 reminds us that digital artists may choose to exploit visible pixellation for particular artistic ends.

A digitally recorded image need not appear any less richly detailed or varied in color than an analog image. All the same, in the terms of D. N. Rodowick, whereas the analog photograph is an “isomorphic transcription” of its subject, a digital photograph is a “data-output”, with a symbolically-mediated link to its subject (Rodowick 2007: 117–8). This ontological divide—described by William J. Mitchell as a “sudden and decisive rupture” in the history of photography (1994: 59), is then assumed to have aesthetic implications: Rodowick insists that the “discontinuities” in digital information “produce perceptual or aesthetic effects”. Despite this insistence, however, Rodowick goes on to acknowledge that, with enough resolution, “a digital photograph can simulate the look of a continuously produced analogical image”. This concession would seem to work against any attempt to identify the aesthetic effects of pixellation, even if “the pixel grid remains in the logical structure of the image” (Rodowick 2007: 119). But if we are to interpret Rodowick charitably, he could be implying that ontology at least partly determines appropriate appreciation; even if a digital photograph can look just like an analog photograph, its (known) digital status affects which of its perceptible features are aesthetically relevant and how we appropriately engage with them.

The media theorists’ worry about the impoverished digital image primarily refers to the production of digital images with its reliance on sampling and quantization. But there are also analogous worries about the digital presentation of images, worries about deep structural changes to analog images once they are displayed digitally—for example, on a liquid crystal display (LCD) screen or when projected digitally on a flat surface. Of course one could simply be interested in investigating these structural changes without being particularly worried about them. This shall be our approach.

The traditional method of film reel projection has been a remarkably stable and entrenched technology, remaining largely unchanged for over a century. But digital projection has almost taken over, particularly in conjunction with the networked distribution of films. Although films’ audiences may not be able to see the difference on screen between analog and digital projection, their expectations are changing—for example, about what can go wrong in the presentation of a film. A deeper assumption that has not changed, one that is almost universal among film scholars, is that films fundamentally depend on an illusion. Cinema is the art of moving images and thus its very existence depends on our being tricked into seeing a rapid succession of static images as a persistent moving image. In the philosophy of film, there is a small debate about the status of cinematic motion—whether it really is an illusion as commonly assumed. An analysis of digital projection technology reveals new complexities in this debate but ultimately provides additional reasons to stick with the popular illusionist view.

Traditional and digital projection methods could not seem more different: the former involves running a flexible film strip through a mechanical projector; the latter involves a complex array of micromirrors on semiconductor chips, which, in combination with a prism and a lamp, generate projectable images from binary code. Nevertheless, both are methods for generating the impression of a continuously illuminated, persistent moving image from a sequence of static images. Compared with traditional projection, however, digital projection includes an extra step, whereby the images in the static sequence are generated from flashes of light. In order to generate each image in the digital projector, a light beam from a high-powered lamp is separated by a prism into its color components of red, blue, and green. Each color beam then hits a different Digital Micromirror Device (DMD), which is a semiconductor chip covered with more than a million tiny, hinged mirrors. Based on the information encoded in the video signal, the DMDs selectively turn over some of the tiny mirrors to reflect the colored lights. Most of the tiny mirrors are flipped thousands of times a second in order to create the gradations of light and dark making up a monochromatic, pixellated image—a mirror that is flipped on a greater proportion of the time will reflect more light and so will form a brighter pixel than a mirror that is not flipped on for so long. Each DMD reflects a monochromatic image back to the prism, which then recombines the colors to form the projected, full-color image. This image—if it were held for long enough on the screen—would be perceived as static. In order then to produce the impression of motion in the projected, full-color image, the underlying memory array of the DMDs has to update rapidly so that all the micromirrors are released simultaneously and allowed to move into a new “address state”, providing new patterns of light modulation for successive images.

The two-stage process of digital projection, by which the moving image is created from a succession of static images that are themselves created by motion, draws attention to the metaphysical complexity of the question of how movies move. In particular, one is unlikely to determine the status of the impression of motion that makes possible the art of cinema unless one can determine the status of the imagery that is seen to move. Given that motion involves an object occupying contiguous spatial locations in successive moments of time, a moving object must be re-identifiable over time. A moving image in a film, arising as it does out of the rapid display of a succession of still images, is not obviously a persistent object that can be seen to move. Then again, perhaps it is enough that ordinary viewers identify an image—say of a moving train— as the same image, for the moving image to persist (Currie 1996). Alternatively, the moving image could be thought to persist as a second-order physical entity constituted by a sequence of flashing lights (Ponech 2006).

The second proposal immediately runs into trouble with digital projection. If the traditionally projected moving image exists as a series of flashes of light, in digital projection, other “intermediate” objects must be granted existence—for example, the stable point of light consisting of the rate of flashes, and gaps between them, of a single micromirror on the DMD. At the same time, the moving image itself must be stripped of its existence since it does not consist of flashes of light. This is due to the fact that, in digital projection, there are no gaps between frames and so no underlying, imperceptible alternation of light and dark. This leaves the realist in the awkward position of claiming that the moving image goes in and out of existence with the switch between analog and digital projection technologies.

The first proposal, on which cinematic motion is a secondary quality, threatens to destroy the distinction between the apparent and the illusory. It suggests a way of reinterpreting any case of perceptual illusion as a case involving the ascription of secondary qualities. That is, unless it can be shown that there are independent means of checking that we are mistaken about genuine illusions. But even if this can be shown, a problem remains: While there may not be an independent check for the motion of an image, there is likewise no independent check for a genuine illusion of color. Given the contrived conditions of film viewing, there is more reason to think of cinematic motion as akin to an illusory, than to a genuine, experience of color. With the introduction of digital projection, the conditions are arguably even more contrived. For it is not just movement in the image but the image itself that is constituted by rapid flashes of light. And the technology involved is far less accessible than that of a traditional mechanical projector in the sense that one cannot, just by looking at the projection device, see (roughly) how it works. In this way, an analysis of digital movie projection serves to reinforce the traditional assumption that cinema is an art of illusion. In addition, however, the analysis suggests that the illusion at the heart of cinema is particularly impenetrable—akin to an illusion of color, and thus an illusion of a mere appearance that cannot be checked (Thomson-Jones 2013).

With digital movie projection, we begin to see the importance of understanding the technology of display for understanding the nature of digital art. Another way we see its importance is in relation to images displayed on LCD screens. According to Goodman, images are essentially analog. Nevertheless, there seems to be a way for engineers to circumvent the essential analogicity of pictorial schemes by using digital technologies for encoded subphenomenal discrimination. Arguably, finite differentiation can be imposed on the scheme of all possible images displayed on high-resolution LCD screens. As we shall see, this has far-reaching implications for the ways in which we think about and properly appreciate image-based art.

Both in his earlier and in his later work in aesthetics, Goodman commits to “a special relation” between the analog and the pictorial, one that is seen when we compare “the presystematic notions of description and picture in a given culture”. Given two schemes, S and S′ , where S consists of all descriptions or predicates in a language such as English, and S′ consists of all pictures, if we were told only of the structures of S and S′ , we could distinguish the pictorial scheme by its being analog (Goodman and Elgin 1988: 130). The special relation remains, Goodman claims, despite the possibility of a digital sub-scheme made up of black and white grid patterns all of which happen to be pictures. In such a scheme, the differences between patterned types that matter for the scheme’s being digital do not include all of the differences that matter for distinguishing pictorial types. Pictures are distinguished by color, shape, and size, which vary continuously; any variation in color, shape, or size potentially results in a different picture. When we impose limits on the differences that matter for distinguishing one grid pattern in the scheme from another, we are not interpreting the grid patterns as pictures; if we were to do so, we would have to treat them as members of a syntactically dense, or analog, scheme.

Goodman’s insight about grid patterns and pictures suggests an immediate difficulty for explaining the digital status of images displayed on LCD screens: Clearly it will not be sufficient to point out that such images are pixellated, and therefore made up of small identical building blocks that impose a lower limit on the differences between display-instances. Remember that pictures are defined by color, shape, and size, which vary continuously. This means there is going to be vagueness at the limits of types – even though the physical pixels of an LCD screen are such that there are gaps between the possible shapes, sizes, and colors that the screen can instantiate; and, there are a finite number of shapes, sizes, and colors that the screen can instantiate. Any means of discretely carving up the property spaces of color, shape, and size has to involve grouping into types what are in fact (subphenomenally) distinct shapes, sizes, and colors, some of which may differ less from adjacent properties grouped into other types. This makes it impossible always to determine unique class membership; hence, finite differentiation fails.

Pixellation alone, no matter the resolution, cannot account for images displayed on LCD screens belonging to a digital scheme; digital images qua images thus remain stubbornly analog. But perhaps a closer analysis of digital imaging technology can show that finite differentiation is met after all. Current technologies for sampling and instantiating light intensities group objective colors well below the level of phenomenal discrimination. For example, in the standard “Truecolor” system, a display pixel has three 8-bit subpixels, each of which emits a different visible wavelength with an intensity from a range of 256 values, yielding over 16 million objective colors. Such a large number of available colors gives the impression of a color continuum when, in fact, digital sampling technology has been used to carve up the objective color space into a disjoint series of wavelength intensities. On the one hand, from the fact that display pixels can be lit at intensities between and indiscriminable from adjacent discriminable intensities, it seems to follow that finite differentiation fails. On the other hand, precisely because digital technology involves microtechnology and metrology for subphenomenal discrimination between colors, the light intensity groupings that are expressed numerically as red-blue-green triplets (in, say, the Truecolor system) can be narrower than the objective color types that contribute to the resultant image scheme. The key is keeping the variations in the essentially analog properties of color, shape, and size small enough so that they cannot accumulate to the point of making a difference to image perception (Zeimbekis 2012). The types in the scheme of digital images are technologically segmented, transitive groupings of the same color-, shape-, and size-experiences. The carving out of a transitive sub-set of magnitudes has to occur relative to the needs of the users of the system. In the case of digital color, the types are classes of light intensities sufficient to cause the same color experience for normal human perceivers. The replicability of digital images is made possible by the gap between the discriminatory limits of the human visual system and the discriminatory limits of digital sampling technology.

Digital images can be replicated insofar as they are digital and thus finitely differentiated. They are finitely differentiated because they rely on subphenomenal sampling and display technology. In practical terms, replication depends on the use of binary code, even though this is not in fact what makes images qua images digital. Of course binary code representations are themselves part of a digital scheme. But the role of binary code in image-instantiation is just one of consistent preservation; preservation for long enough to permit reproduction. Despite the inherent replicability of digital images, it does not appear to follow automatically that artworks involving these images are multiples.

The SF MoMA is in possession of the original of Kalpakjian’s work, Corridor ; they control access to the video imagery. At present, the work is not available to be viewed: it cannot be viewed on-line as part of a digital archive or collection, nor is it currently on view in the physical space of the museum. The image sequence comprising the work could be multiply instantiated and widely distributed, but in fact it is not, nor is it meant to be. Similarly with Arcangel & Davis’s work, Landscape Study #4 : This work is described as an installation, meant to be exhibited in a physical gallery alongside an arrangement of printed stills, with a television connected to a Nintendo Entertainment System. Again, the image sequence displayed on the television could be multiply instantiated and widely distributed, but it is not, nor is it meant to be. Clips and copies of the landscape imagery are available on-line, but these do not instantiate parts of the work itself. By contrast, works of net art are instantiated whenever they are accessed by someone on-line.

There are many kinds of net art, including various forms of experimental on-line literature, conceptual browser art, and works drawing on software and computer gaming conventions. Extensive on-line collections of visual and audiovisual net art are rigorously curated and at the same time immediately accessible to ordinary Internet users. When it comes to the conventions of access and presentation, the contrast is striking between works of net art and works like those by Kalpakjian, and Arcangel & Davis. Perhaps a digital artwork comprising multiply instantiable images need not itself be multiply instantiable. At this point, the philosophy of digital art joins an ongoing debate about the ontology of art.

On the question of whether artworks are all the same kind of thing or many different kinds of things, ontological pluralism is often taken to be implied by the primary role of the artist in “sanctioning” features of their work (Irvin 2005, 2008; Thomasson 2010). A sanction can consist simply in, say, the painting of a canvas by a self-professed artist and the subsequent display of the work in a gallery. The artist has sanctioned those features of the work that make it a traditional painting. But what was once largely implicit is now often explicit: many contemporary works of art are defined by a set of instructions for their presentation (e.g., aspect ratio, resolution). We can find plenty of examples of non-digital works that are defined by a set of instructions, such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991). This work is given to a gallery to display by way of nothing more than a set of instructions for constructing and maintaining a pile of candies. Whether non-digital or digital, the instructions determine what is part of the work and what is not, and whether the work is singular or multiply instantiable. As a result, the instructions guide appropriate interpretation of the work. On this view, ontology precedes interpretation: we cannot properly and fully appreciate a work, for the work that it is, without a prior determination of what it comprises. This is a matter of contention, however. On another way of thinking, artworks just are objects of interpretation, and there is no artwork whose boundaries can be identified before we begin interpretation (Davies 2004).

The issue of the relation between ontology and interpretation is a complex and difficult one, but progress can be made on the issue through an examination of digital art practices. This is particularly in light of the high degree of self-consciousness with which many digital artists and digital art curators specify the features of digital art works. It is a common practice, for example, when archiving net art, to have artists fill out a questionnaire in order to specify which features of a work are crucial for its preservation—whether features of appearance, timing and motion, interactivity potentials and methods, linking to other sites, or hardware and software. When a work of net art is individuated by its imagery, say, the artist has chosen to make the inherent replicability of digital imagery part of the work. That this is a choice is suggested by the existence of singular works of digital visual art, like the examples discussed above. The question of whether the works by Kalpakjian, and Arcangel & Davis can function allographically requires further investigation (see D’Cruz and Magnus 2014). But if they can so function, the artist’s presentation instructions have a primary role to play in fixing, not just the art form (installation, movie, conceptual work, etc.) but the basic structure of the work – for example, in determining whether the work is singular and thus identical with a certain kind of physical display or multiple with no original display. Where interactive digital works are concerned, individuation is determined by a set of algorithms. An algorithmic account of interactive digital art suggests that, although the code is important for adequate instantiation of the work, it is the algorithm that specifies the crucial features of the work (Lopes 2010; Tavinor 2011; Moser 2018). Since the code is, ontologically speaking, less relevant than the algorithm, this account makes allowances for the variability that may be found in the code when an instance of a program is run on different kinds of devices.

Reflection on the kinds and significance of choices available to an artist contributes to a full appreciation of the artist’s work. For any artwork, appreciation begins with recognition of its status as a work , the product of artistic activity of some kind, and thus something to be appreciated as the achievement of an artist or group of artists. Most commonly, this achievement is understood in terms of the aesthetically significant effects achieved by an artist with certain kinds of tools and materials and in light of certain appreciative conventions. In other words, the achievement is always relative to an artistic medium. Returning to the case of an artist choosing what to do about the inherent replicability of digital imagery, another way of thinking about this choice is in terms of the artist recognizing the limits and capacities of their chosen medium. Images conveyed digitally are always replicable and so when an artist aims to convey artistic content through digital imagery, they either have to accept the inevitable multiplicity of their works or resist the tendency of the medium and somehow specify the work’s singularity in presentation. At a more fine-grained level, our appreciation of particular effects—of color and composition, expression, narrative structure, and so on—depends on the effects themselves but also on background acknowledgment of their degree of difficulty or innovation in the relevant medium. The production of digital art relies on the computer automation of many of the tasks, both manual and cognitive, traditionally involved in making art. The effects achieved by computer automation cannot be assessed in the same way as those achieved by traditional “hands-on” artistic methods. The terms of our appreciation, therefore, need to be adjusted in the digital age. This is certainly compatible with the continued relevance of medium-based appreciation, as long as we can make sense of digital media as artistic media (Binkley 1998). But there is a strong tendency in film and media studies to assume that the medium has absolutely no role to play in the appreciation of digital art.

Summing up this view, it supposedly follows from the fact that modern (digital) computers encode every kind of information in the same way—i.e., as a sequence of binary digits—that a digital artwork is no longer defined by its mode of presentation, whether in images, moving images, sound patterns, or text. A work’s display is rendered merely contingent by the fact that it is generated from a common code. By adding a particular instruction to the code sequence specifying a work, imagery associated with that work could be instantaneously converted into sounds or text, or just into different imagery. This possibility alone supposedly renders meaningless all talk of an artwork being in a particular medium and being properly appreciated in terms of that medium (Kittler 1999; Doane 2007).

Given the considerable effects of digital technology on artistic production, it is perhaps understandable that some commentators are inclined toward a radical overhauling of art theoretical concepts. But their arguments in support of such an overhaul are, at best, incomplete. We see this once we cite some important continuities between ways of making and thinking about art in the analog age and in the digital age. It has always been the case, for example, that “any medium can be translated into any other” (Kittler 1999: 1): Without using a computer, someone could manually devise a set of rules (an algorithm) for the translation of image values, say, into sounds or text. Moreover, a common storage and transmission means for (moving) imagery and sound is not unique to digital technology: As Doron Galili points out (2011), electronic image transmission going back to the late nineteenth century—in other words, precursors of the TV—relies on the conversion of both images and sound into electronic pulses.

Apart from these important continuities, the media theorist’s inference from translatability to medium-free art simply does not hold. That we could set about “translating” the imagery of Seven Samurai into a symphony does not mean that the original artwork lacks a medium; it is a film, after all, and as such, it has to be in the medium of moving images. The symphonic translation of Seven Samurai is not the same work as the 1954 film by Akira Kurosawa. This reminds us that, in deciding whether there is a digital medium, we must not reduce the medium to the artist’s materials, for it also matters how the artist uses those materials. Nor must we limit the constitutive materials of a medium to physical materials. The case of literature shows that neither the materials of an art form, nor their modes of manipulation, need be physical. The medium of literature is neither paper and ink nor abstract lexical symbols, but letters and words used in certain ways. There are, of course, many different ways of physically storing and transmitting literary works, including by the printed page, in audio recordings, and by memory (human or computer). But from the fact that David Copperfield can be preserved in many different formats, it does not follow that this novel is any less decisively a novel and, as such, in the medium of literature.

Just as with a literary work, the preservation and transmission of digital works in different formats depends on the use of a common code, but a binary numeric code rather than a lexical one. As we have seen, words and their literary uses constitute the medium of literature. In the same way, binary code, along with the information it implements, and its artistic uses constitute the medium of digital art. This allows for the possibility that the digital medium contains various sub-media, or “nested” media (Gaut 2010). For instance, within the medium of digital art, the medium of digital visual art comprises artistic uses of computer code specifically to create images. In technical terms, such uses can be referred to as (artistic) “bitmapping”, given that a computer ultimately stores all images (2D and 3D vector) as bitmaps, which are code sequences specifying the integers assigned to light intensity measurements in a pixel grid. The medium of bitmapping is thus distinguished by a kind of digital technology, but the kind used to produce just those items belonging to the traditional medium of images.

Once the notion of digital media is revealed to be no more confused or mysterious than the familiar notion of literary media, its irreducible role in appreciation becomes apparent. To take just one example, proper appreciation of films in the digital age depends on recognizing that digital filmmaking tools do not just make traditional filmmaking easier; they also present new creative possibilities and challenges. Given the maturity and mass-art status of the cinematic art form, it is easy to take for granted the medium of moving imagery; we may think we know exactly what its limits are, and we may even think we have seen everything that can be done with it. The digital medium is different, however, and digital cinema is in both the medium of moving imagery and the digital medium.

At first glance, it might seem odd to speak of “challenges” or “limits” in relation to digital processes, which allow for instantaneous and endless modification with increasingly user-friendly applications and devices. The high degree of automation in the process of capturing an image with a digital video camera, along with increasingly high image resolution and memory capacity, could make it seem as though digital images are too easily achieved to be interesting. Then there are the practically endless possibilities for “correcting” the captured image with applications like Photoshop. When we take a photo or video on our smartphones, an AI program automatically optimizes focus, contrast, and detail. Digital sound recording is likewise increasingly automated, increasingly fine-grained, and reliant on ever-larger computer memory capacities. Modifying and mastering recorded sound with digital editing software allows for an unlimited testing of options. In digital film editing, sequence changes are instantaneous and entirely reversible—quite unlike when the editing process involved the physical cutting and splicing of a film (image or sound) strip. Digital tools thus allow filmmakers to focus (almost) purely on the look and sound of the movie without having to worry about the technical difficulty or finality of implementation.

Rather than dismissing all digital works as too easily achieved to be interesting, medium-based appreciation requires that we consider the digital on its own terms. This means we must allow for the possibility that certain kinds of increased technical efficiency can bring new creative risks. For example, even though committing to certain editorial decisions does not entail irreversible alterations to a filmstrip, arriving at those decisions involves sifting through and eliminating far more options, a process which can easily become overwhelming and therefore more error-ridden. When we properly appreciate a digital film, part of what we need to appreciate is the significance of any scene or sequence looking just the way it does when it could have, so easily, looked many other ways. Similarly, when we properly appreciate an interactive digital installation or videogame, we are, in part, appreciating certain representations, functions, and capabilities of the input-output system, made possible by digital media. This is undeniably a form of medium-based appreciation and the medium to which we appeal is digital. It is only when we think of a digital film as in a digital medium that we can appreciate it as a particular response to the creative problem, introduced by coding, of finalizing selections from a vast array of equally and instantly available options.

The case of digital cinema is perhaps a useful starting point for work in the philosophy of digital art. Digital cinema is a multi-media art form, after all, involving 2D and 3D moving images as well as sound. It also has the potential for robust interactivity, whereby audiences select story events or otherwise modify a film screening in prescribed ways (Gaut 2010: 224–43). Many of the digital tools developed by the film and video game industries are now available more widely to artists interested in making other forms of digital art, including net art, digital sound installations, and virtual reality art (Grau 2003; Chalmers 2017; Tavinor 2019). In terms of how the use of these tools affects proper appreciation, there are important continuities between the filmmaking context and the wider digital art world. In addition, the philosophy of film is a well-established subfield in aesthetics, one that engages with both film theory and cognitive science in order to explicate the nature of film as a mass art (Thomson-Jones 2014, Other Internet Resources). For many of the standard topics in the philosophy of film, interesting and important questions arise when we extend the discussion from analog to digital cinema. There is a question, for example, about the kinds and significance of realism that can be achieved with traditional celluloid film as compared with manipulated digital imagery (Gaut 2010: 60–97). The philosophy of film can provide some of the initial terms of analysis for artworks in a broad range of digital media. At the same time, it is important to approach each of the digital arts on their own terms under the assumption that the digital is an artistically significant category.

4. Interactivity

More and more, contemporary artists are taking advantage of the dynamic and responsive capabilities of digital media to make art interactive. The experimental online literature, conceptual browser art, and videogames mentioned above all require user interactivity, but they do so to varying degrees. Therefore, if interactivity plays a distinctive role in the digital arts, there are good reasons to analyse the nature of these works more deeply.

Not all digital works are interactive, and not all interactive works are digital. However, since computers are inherently interactive, much of the early philosophical literature on interactivity arose from the emergence of computer art (also see Smuts 2009; Lopes 2001; Saltz 1997). The distinctive character of interactive digital art is best considered in tandem with the work’s ontology.

Before analyzing interactivity any further, first, consider the following description of the digital installation “Universe of Water Particles on a Rock where People Gather” (henceforth, “Rock where People Gather”) by TeamLab:

“Rock where People Gather” is reproduced in a virtual three-dimensional space. Water is simulated to fall onto the rock, and the flow of the water draws the shape of the waterfall. The water is represented by a continuum of numerous water particles and the interaction between the particles is then calculated. Lines are drawn in relation to the behavior of the water particles. The lines are then “flattened” using what TeamLab considers to be “ultrasubjective” space. When a person stands on the rock or touches the waterfall, they too become like a rock that changes the flow of water. The flow of water continues to transform in real time due to the interaction of people. Previous visual states can never be replicated, and will never reoccur (TeamLab 2018).

“Rock where People Gather” illustrates that interactive works permit us to appreciate both the work and the properties brought about by the interactions. To define these characteristics of interactive art, Dominic Lopes states, “A work of art is interactive just in case it prescribes that the actions of its users help generate its display” (Lopes 2010:36, original emphasis). The display is anything that is instanced in a work, or the perceptual properties that come about via interactivity. Users help generate these features making interactive works distinctive. However, at this point, one could imagine reading the chapters of, let us say, a digitized copy of The Brothers Karamazov in random order, thereby changing what properties get instanced from the original work. Does this example qualify as interactive art in the Lopesian sense? Although some stories, such as choose-your-own-adventure books, allow readers to shuffle the narrative arc, most traditional stories do not; if the randomized Karamazov example is interactive, it is only so in the weakest sense of the term because users are not prescribed to change the properties as described. Another way to think about these differences returns us to a work’s structure. Readers who decide to roguishly randomize a story merely change how they access a work’s structure simply because the medium does not prohibit it, whereas readers of choose-your-own-adventure books and other interactive works can change the work’s structure in a prescribed manner (Lopes 2001:68).

That users are responsible for generating certain features of an interactive work means that their displays, unlike those of non-interactive works, can occur in a couple of different ways (Lopes 2010: 37-38). The less standard of the two occurs when the displays of an interactive work are generated in a succession of states over a period of time, but where none of the displays can be revisited. One such example is Telegarden , a temporary work of computer art that users accessed from a networked computer. The work was comprised of a table with an attached mechanical arm that dispensed water and food for the plants via the users’ inputs. As one may imagine, the garden took shape in a variety of ways over the span of its exhibition, but each state of the garden, or its succession of display states, could not be repeated. Although not common, videogames can also exhibit this kind of display variability. Consider the experimental game, Cube . For a limited time, players could explore a large cube and its nested smaller cubes while racing to be the first to reach the center. As with Telegarden , players generated different properties of the game displays by interacting with it, but once a new display was generated, the previous ones were gone.

The more standard of the two variable structures for interactive works are displays that can be repeated, such as most net art and videogames that can be accessed many times, from multiple locations, to generate different displays. Although repeatable works are more common (at least with videogames if not museum-housed works), more needs to be said about the changing properties of these works and how the repeatability trait distinguishes interactive digital works from non-interactive digital images.

If the display properties of digital images can vary from instance to instance due to even slightly different settings on different devices (e.g., brightness, resolution, intensity), then the aesthetic and structural differences of many works could be misconstrued as interactive. Since the example just given is not an interactive work of art, it is worth looking more closely at what is going on with non-interactive repeatable works versus interactive repeatable ones. Consider traditional performance works such as works of theater and music. Each performance might differ to a slight degree due to different performers and other varying conditions of the environment, and these may certainly affect our aesthetic experiences each time. However, those changes, in principle, do not reshape the structure of the performed play or song. In the same way, the subtle changes made with a digitally displayed image do not change the structure of the image-based work. Compare those slight artistic or aesthetic variations to the display variability of interactive works. For example, many videogames permit players to choose which route to take, quests to accept, characters to kill or save, personalities to adopt, and the like. These sorts of in-game player choices are not merely generating features such as varying the brightness or resolution, nor are they as straightforwardly interactive as a game of chess that ends in a win or a loss. Rather, the degree of variability permits multiple endings. Again for comparison, while traditional tragedies will always end on a tragic note, some highly variable works can end either on a tragic note or on one that is not at all tragic.

To articulate the above more clearly, Dominic Preston says,

for any given artwork, each possible set of structural and aesthetic properties F is a display type of that artwork. (Preston 2014: 271, original emphasis).

From the above, we can briefly infer the following scenarios: works like digital photographs are ontologically similar to plays and music because they consist of one prescribed display type. While the display type might permit multiple displays (duplicates, performances, instances, etc.) consisting of subtle variances between the particular tokens, there is still a single correct display that should be maintained or achieved. Works that instance a succession of states such as Telegarden and Cube consist of multiple potential display types where only one display type is instantiated at any given time. Now, compare such works with those like videogames that present us with the strong degrees of display variability mentioned earlier. Because some repeatable works can end drastically differently from one “playthrough” to the next, there is no singular, correct display. Instead, these sorts of works consist of both multiple display types and multiple displays, which means users will generate one of the possible display types (and their displays) each time they repeat the work.

According to Katherine Thomson-Jones (2021), there is a problem with Preston’s claim that interactive artworks — at least ones that are digital — have multiple display types, as well as multiple displays. This is because the digital is inherently replicable and replicability requires a transmissible display — a single display type that can have multiple, interchangeable instances. This seems to introduce a problem of incompatibility: How can we have an image whose instances still count as instances of the same image-based work when those instances, in virtue of users’ actions, look very different from one another? There are various ways one might overcome this problem — for example, by distinguishing between the display of an image and the display of an artwork that incorporates the image in question. Preston’s distinction between display and display type can continue to play a role here. While the concept of interactivity with high variability is mostly applicable to videogames, one can imagine interactive digital installations, net art, and table-top roleplaying games to which it also applies.

It is important to reiterate that the strong interactivity just described is not restricted to the digital. Whilst interactivity is a standard feature of many contemporary digital works, and the responsiveness of such works is remarkable, non-digital appreciative categories can also exploit a similar degree of display variability. For example, literature, theater, and tabletop role-playing games can be strongly interactive in ways similar to many digital artworks. What is unique about all such works are the ways in which things like immersion, agency, identity, and fiction, to list a few features, are impacted by interactivity, due to the user’s role in the work (for more, see Robinson & Tavinor 2018; Patridge 2017; Meskin & Robson 2016).

A noteworthy point about the concepts presented above is that they are all conceived with the norms of traditional art and art practices in mind, meaning, works of art that are predominantly object-based. However, as described, interactive digital works can be said to have a “behavior” based on prescribed interactions. While traditional artworks typically emphasize a work that is complete prior to audience engagement, interactive works emphasize the moment-to-moment unfolding of the works by way of audience engagement. One recent approach to the ontology of art suggests that interactive works (among other kinds) are better conceived on a process-based, rather than on an object-based, model (Nguyen 2020). A key difference between the two models is that the former focuses on the user’s actions and experiences or “inward aesthetics”, while the latter focuses on the “outward” aesthetic features of the self-contained object (Nguyen 2020: 25). While a process-based account prioritizes the internalizability of a user’s actions, it does not completely give up the idea of an artistic object. Rather, it renders the object’s significance secondary insofar as any appreciation for a work’s objecthood is in service to the activities it permits (Nguyen 2020: 20).

Just as the case of digital art can enrich our understanding of interactivity, so it can enrich our understanding of artistic creativity and creative attribution. This is in part because the issues of interactivity and creativity are closely related. In making a work that is strongly interactive, an artist cedes to the user a certain amount of control in determining the look, sound, or structure of the work’s display(s). This raises a question about the user’s opportunities to be creative — to engage in creative interactions with a work — and how these opportunities can be supported or constrained by the artist’s design. In order to answer this question, we need to unpack the notion of creative control. In addition, we need to consider how creativity can be attributed to multiple agents involved at different stages of a work’s production. As it turns out, the case of AI art is particularly useful when considering the conditions of creativity and creative collaboration.

There is already a robust debate about the nature of creativity as it occurs in many different areas of human activity (see, e.g., Gaut & Kieran, eds., 2018; Paul & Kaufman, eds., 2014) There is a case to be made, however, that this debate can be enriched by drawing on work in the philosophy of AI. In everyday life, sophisticated AI systems are now being used for all kinds of purposes: We rely on these systems when we use Internet search engines, play strategic videogames, accept purchasing recommendations from online retailers, and check for viruses on our computers. In addition, we can use AI to generate new images and text, some of which can be incorporated into works of art. One can type a series of prompts into a chatbot like ChatGPT in order to generate a new screenplay in a certain genre. Similarly, one can assemble a set of images on which to train an “artbot” like MidJourney in order to generate paintings, drawings, or what look like photographs. It is common to attribute creative agency to the person who purposively initiates, and then monitors, the program used to generate the images or text that make up a work of AI art. A question remains, however, as to whether this should be the sole creative attribution when AI is involved. Some artists describe the AI system with which they work as a creative “partner”, and not just a sophisticated artistic tool. This is particularly the case with recent artworks that rely on “Deep Learning” (DL) to generate images or text in a remarkably independent way. Both chatbots and artbots rely on deep learning to categorize huge datasets (images or text) according to previously undetected patterns. To do this, a DL system must give itself new instructions — ones that depart from the initial instructions of the program — for the kind of image or text segment, and for the particular image or text segment, to be produced.

Among AI artists, the ones who write their own DL programs are the most likely to describe AI as a creative partner rather than just a creative tool. This seems particularly fitting when there is a synchronous collaboration between the artist and their DL system. For example, the works of Sougwen Chun are the result of Chun drawing alongside and in response to the actions of a mechanical drawing arm that is controlled by Chun’s custom-made program, D.O.U.G. (short for “Drawing Operations Unity Generation X ”). Chun and D.O.U.G. take turns adding to a single drawing. During this process, it is harder than one might think to say what makes the difference such that Chun is a creative agent, engaged in a creative drawing process, and D.O.U.G. is not. This is the case even though it is Chun alone who comes up with the idea for the work and initiates the drawing program.

As Margaret Boden has argued (2014), when philosophers deny the possibility of a computer ever being creative, they tend to underestimate the capacities of computers to produce items that are genuinely new as well as valuable in some domain. Still, many creativity theorists argue that novelty and value are insufficient for creativity; a third condition is needed, one concerning the manner of production. In order for something novel and valuable to count as creative, it must have been produced in a way that is agent-driven. The agency condition can be filled out, or broken down, in a variety of ways. At its core, however, the notion of agency is generally assumed to be opposed to the notion of having been ‘programmed’, or simply instructed, to perform certain tasks in a “mechanical”, or blind, fashion. Thus, the most basic objection to the possibility of creative computers is that they can only do what they are programmed to do, according to the intentions of a human agent. This objection needs clarification, however, since no set of rules completely determines the actions involved in following that set of rules. Since the advent of DL and other kinds of generative algorithm, it is possible for a computer program to change itself, to detect independent phenomena other than the ones that it was designed to detect, and to mimic spontaneity through randomness. Is this an instance of creative rule-following? If it is, we might expand our notion of creative collaboration. Perhaps creative collaboration is found, not just between human beings, but also between human beings and machines. In so far as the machines in question support strong interactivity, a work of digital art might involve three-part collaborations between human artists, human users, and AI.

Digital media can also be used for the purpose of connecting physical locations to virtual ones by using locative media. The phrase “locative art” is traced to Karlis Kalnins who applied the phrase to experimental projects coming from Locative Media Lab, a collective of international researchers and practitioners working with locative media. (Galloway & Ward 2005 ). Since the term “locative” is connected to location, site-specificity plays a significant role in our appreciation of locative works. Unlike with non-digital cases, however, site-specificity in locative art is both physical and virtual. The general concept is this: locative-specific media connect physical spaces with virtual ones, the perceptual features of which are generated from a digital device by human interactions. We often experience locative media in our ordinary and daily lives through navigation systems like Google Maps or Waze, and also creatively through augmented reality apps like Pokemon Go, AR graffiti (an app that allows users to visualize what their graffiti will look like in situ ), architectural simulators, and more. These are location-based works, often called locative projects or locative art, that use locative media. While locative technology has been around for decades, it is a relatively new subcategory to be recognized within the arts. Even so, locative art is more broadly acknowledged in the fields of technology, games, and sociology.

To understand the many ways locative media might be used for artistic practice, consider the following three examples.

• What Was There (2010–2023) was a website that allows users to type in the coordinates of their current location (via their digital device) to see how certain geographical locations look throughout history. By typing a specific address into the application, the user experiences the physical location in front of them and represented images and facts of that location as they appeared in the past, from the same vantage point. Data on the site relies on regular citizens to upload historic images and connect them to specific locations, making them accessible to others; the greater the participation the richer the experience when navigating a particular place. Not only can guests gain a deeper connection to their specific localized places, but such applications motivate people to explore and appreciate locations outside of their normal destinations.
• The Transborder Immigrant Tool has been used in a number of artworks and exhibitions.

The Transborder Immigrant Tool, devised by Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, was a mobile phone application intended to guide individuals who were making their way to the United States through the deserts of the U.S./Mexico borderlands to water. The application delivered poetry to its users in an effort to assist in their emotional and mental well-being while offering information about survival during the dangerous journey. The creators of The Transborder Immigrant Tool considered it to be a performance intervention that included the app itself, its API, public reactions, and an ensuing government investigation. By the time TBT was ready for distribution in 2011, the border crossing had become more dangerous, presenting the risk that carrying a TBT phone might put users in danger. While the project was never distributed to its intended users, it still succeeded in confounding systems of political control, creating a call to action that resonated internationally, and using poetry to “dissolve” the US-Mexico border (Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 et al 2007).

• KlingKlangKlong is played with smartphones that translate the players’ locations into sound. This is achieved in a straightforward manner: By moving through the physical space, the players simultaneously move on the surface of a virtual sequencer. One dimension (usually the latitude of the player) corresponds to pitch, the other dimension (longitude) is mapped to the time-position on the sequencer. The interface allows a manual switch to other audio parameters, although this feature is experimental. Each device receives the location and state changes of the currently active players almost instantly. The devices are connected by a central server, which also sets the boundaries of the playing field and manages the virtual players.

KlingKlangKlong serves as an experimental arrangement to explore the idea of playful (social) systems, a construction where human and virtual subsystems play with each other. In addition to the human participants, it therefore deploys a number of virtual players (»Virtuals«). Humans and Virtuals meet each other in mixed reality, a concept that was realized in early locative games. The commonly created soundtrack is the primary medium of communication between the players. Musical structures may temporarily arise through synchronized movements or be destroyed by any player’s intervention (Straeubig & Quack 2016).

In each of these examples, users synchronize geographical locations with virtual ones, granting mobility for users while also further challenging the paradigm of museum-driven works and art appreciation. The interactivity described in section 4 factors significantly into each of these projects, but also of importance are the social, economic, environmental, and political implications that factor in the design, development, and use of such works. Most of these projects are intended to bring about positive change, one way or another, by using locative media and by borrowing certain gaming mechanics for the purpose of engagement and interactivity. In fact, much of what is written about locative art is from fields within digital media studies on the media’s ‘playable’ qualities (avoiding the idea that artists are trying to merely gamify public spaces).

On the playable nature of locative art, Miguel Sicart says,

the data produced and used in smart cities should not necessarily be presented as a utility for citizens. It should be presented as a prop for play, as games but also as the source for toys and playgrounds. Data-rich cities can become playable cities, and, by becoming such, they can become more human, more inclusive spaces (Ackermann: 2016, 27).

Once again, the process-oriented and performative nature of locative works is central to appreciating the spaces they create. In connection with the playability of locative media, locative projects are also modifiable and typically intended to be hackable by the public in the communities where they are displayed. While the terms “hacker” and “hacking” may carry negative connotations, in its original conception, the practice of hacking was meant to improve upon existing computer programs, acknowledging the achievements of both the original creator and subsequent revisionists (Levy:1984). It is in this vein that locative projects are usually intended to change and improve over time given how users “play” with the data and inputs. In other words, local communities can play with these projects and even modify them, making locative works as relevant and reflective of the community as possible.

The above suggests that locative projects often have broader goals than mere entertainment. Although often intended to motivate play and playful attitudes, which, as indicated in the examples above can occur to varying degrees, the goal-oriented nature of locative works often makes the kind of play involved a “serious” kind. Serious play occurs when the enjoyment and pleasure that come from play do not just comprise entertainment but also serve some meritorious, real-world goal. A work can be said to support serious play even when users are not aware of the social or political goals of the work.

The customizable nature of locative media lends itself well to the altruistic aims of many locative artists. However, inclusivity, climate protection, social change, and any other desired effect of locative projects requires a given community to have sufficient funds for, access to, and user-knowledge about digital locative technology. This concern can also be understood, not just in terms of community requirements, but also in terms of technological requirements, for successful locative art. One way of putting it is as follows:

For any technological device to be “aware” of its context—physical or otherwise—it has to be able to locate, classify, collect, store, and use “relevant” information, as well as to identify and discard or ignore “irrelevant” information (Galloway & Ward 2005).

There are numerous political and economic factors affecting access to local and global spaces. With locative art, these factors are concerning for both ethical and artistic reasons.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Thomson-Jones, Katherine, 2014, Philosophy of Film , in Oxford Bibliographies Online .
• Enlighten, “WhatWasThere” (2010–2023) [ WhatWasThere available online ] [ archive link ]
• Gottfried Michael Koenig Project
• Austin Museum of Digital Art
• Digital Art Museum
• Rhizome’s Artbase , the largest on-line archive of new media art
• Digital Art & Design – Victoria and Albert Museum , information on the history and practice of computer art and design.
• The Whitney Museum’s Art Port , providing access to the museum’s collection of digital art and an exhibition space for commissioned works of net art.

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Essay Sample about Digital Art

Art is a form of creativity that has been around since the creation of the earth. It has many different mediums or forms, a lot of history, and millions of creators worldwide. But one of the things that we’ll talk about is a new medium, digital art. Digital art is a new medium that has become popular in the past two decades as the digital age has been ushered in. Some people think that it isn’t “real art”, but today I’ll show why digital art is real art.

Digital art has pros in many ways. For example, when drawing on paper, the paper gets worn and torn as mistakes get erased and fixed . With markers and permanent materials, they are unable to be erased. With digital art, it is possible to erase all mistakes, and even use the undo button, which’ll erase the last line that was drawn. Digital art makes it easier to share and keep personal drawings accessible. It also is much cleaner than traditional art, which might have faint lines of pencil or accidental lines from a pen. 

With any new medium, it takes years to refine digital art skills. Picking the right program to use, exploring it, and getting used to the mechanics, takes a lot of time. One of the most used arguments is that there isn’t technically an ‘original’ piece, as it can be printed out infinitely, copied, and shared. That is true, but one of the other points is that heart and soul isn’t present as it is in traditional art. This is not true, digital artists put hours and days into some pieces, which is self explanatory. Another example would be when digital artists' drawings get stolen, which oftentimes they fight for the person who stole it to take it down.

Digital art is not only just drawing, which is only a subsection of digital art. It is composed of music, video games, e-books, and movies. Music can be recorded by microphones, and put into an editing software, which is then posted to spotify or Youtube, that is one example of digital art in other forms. People who make the argument that digital art is not ‘real art’, will also listen to music that was produced with digital software, read e-books, or play video games. Technically, they wouldn’t actually be listening to ‘real’ music, reading ‘real’ books, or playing ‘real’ video games, because music, books, video games are forms of art.

In closing, digital art is real art. There are many digital and traditional artists out there. It shouldn’t matter what medium that is used, what should matter is the connection between creations. Art is an important way of connecting with people, and it shouldn’t be plagued with arguments and trivial debates. I rest my case.

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Click names or images to take the MOCA tour WHAT IS DIGITAL ART? Photographer, artist and philosopher Larry Bolch wrote, "Photography is not an art. It is a medium through which artist's may create art." One can make the same statement about so called "digital art". Considering digital as a medium for the creation of art, rather than an art itself doesn't help narrow it down much, however; because then you have to wonder; "which art?" Perhaps a better way to state the problem, today, is to ask; "What isn't digital art?" Computers have invaded and expanded nearly every art form. From the digital creation, recording, manipulation and distribution of music, to animation and film editing; from word processing to the instantaneous cueing of hundreds of complex theatrical lighting and scenery changes digital tools are there helping artists make art. Yet, if you are an artist making two-dimensional compositions for display on the web or for sale as any of a wide variety of print you may expect some strange resistance and lack of external validation. No one seems to question the authenticity of a digitally performed theatrical cue or to worry that the word processor has made writing too easy. Now that the computer has replaced the mathematician's chalkboard, pencil and slide rule, no one asks, by virtue of the tools or lack of materials used; "Is that real math or did the computer do it?" Still, as pervasive as digital tools have become in the creation of a wide range of art forms these questions are asked of two-dimensional inanimate art created on a computer. For the sake of this review this is what I mean by "digital art". And, with the help of some wonderful examples collected here by the MOCA gallery, we will look to where this work has come and perhaps shed some light on the path ahead. PLAYING THE MUSIC Bolch also observed, "the artist chooses the media and the goal of every artist is to become fluent enough with the media to transcend it. At some point you pass from playing the piano to playing music." As digital tools are employed by more artists working in more diverse fields the analogies that for so long have attempted to describe the commonalties of all art forms begin to come into sharper focus. The writer, musician, painter, the film editor or photographer sit down before pretty much the same sort of art making devise and share the common craft of digital information processing to achieve the work; making it immediately clear how poetry can share a kinship to painting, photography and music. Well over a decade of practice and experimentation in making digital art has brought to the scene artists possessing a fine degree of skill with imaging software. And, yet the average person or art lover knows little of what a digital artist does to create their work. Software salesman are of little help, since they work hard to promote the myth that art on a computer is just a mouse click away. Compared to painting which, even though few can handle expertly, nearly all can understand the process; the learning curve for the appreciation of digital art seems almost as steep as for the manipulation of the tools themselves. However, this is not an excuse for the critic or art lover who refuses to seriously consider digital art simply because they don't know how it is made. Art is not about the tools used to make it; but in the organization of color, line, form, composition, rhythm and the interplay of all these in support of the subject matter or intent of the work itself. These are the basic and well established tenants of visual art and as fundamental to digital art work as to the cave paintings of Lascaux. DIGITAL PAINT AND DRAW : Natural Media This point is best demonstrated by work created with "Natural Media" software. The digital artist working in this vein has an assortment of tools designed to make marks which simulate on the computer screen and in print nearly all traditional paint and draw tools. In the MOCA galleries the works of Mavi Roberto , Joan Myerson Shrager , Jago Titcomb , D.L. Zimmerman , and Steiner Rosenburg are prime examples of this genre of digital art. Their pictures are built up mark upon mark until the composition is complete. The look and even a good part of the feel of traditional drawing and painting media can be achieved with skill and patience. That these marks appear as pure light on a glass screen is indication of both the revolutionary advances and the tradeoffs that the digital artist makes. New production techniques such as multiple undo, and the ability to save work at various stages along its development and to integrate one version or piece of art seamlessly into another are great boons to art making. Digital work never reaches that level of material preciousness at which even the most courageous painter would not risk destroying their work just to follow some wild inspiration. The digital artist has adopted a medium that works as fast as one's imagination and presents constant opportunities to refine composition and fine tune color. On the other hand, spontaneous accidents and the effects of gravity do not come easy in digital media and often what can be achieved in a single looping wet drippy stroke of paint must be rendered laboriously by the digital artist. Not having to stretch canvas, wash brushes or mix and then wait for paint to dry may deny the digital artist some material pleasures, but also saves time. While elapsed time is certainly not an issue nor a criterion for judging any piece of art, time saved using digital tools is almost always re-invested in experimentation and decision making. Subsequently, this investment in design should make digital art among the tightest and most well considered compositions in art today. DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY: Photo-Manipulation With the genre of "Photo-Manipulation" we recognize how much digital art shares with the art form of photography. The first highly technologically driven art making system to suffer the burden of "point and click" simplicity, traditional photography had to wait out the proliferation of popular understanding of the process and the subsequent recognition by the masses of the nuances necessary to create great pictures before gaining its rightful place in the world of fine art. Today this struggle belongs to digital art. But it is digital photography and the lessons learned by traditional photography's move up to fine art that is helping to drive the ultimate acceptance of digital art. And, in return, the digital darkroom has revolutionized how we make photographic art. Producing sensitive imagery in the tradition of the chemical dark room, as we see reflected in the work of Jeff Alu , Steve Bingham , and Ricardo Baez Duarte required tedious and imperfect techniques that are now achieved with unprecedented speed and pin point control by artists who have more time to focus on ideas and composition than the long process of trial and error that was necessary leading to a degree of control over wet photography. Digital photography tools reduce exposure to dangerous and uncomfortable studio situations while expanding aesthetic potentials through new production techniques. And, this particular expanded aesthetic is with us constantly in our daily lives. DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY: Photo-Collage As photography reached a level of maturity in the 1920's and 30's many modernist artists began to experiment with different techniques of using photos in their art; among them the collage and montage. In the USA during the1950's the fad of psychoanalysis coupled with the advertising industry's discovery that surrealistic imagery in its attention to sex and other dreams of desire was highly marketable; fostered an enduring love for "trick photography". It is no small coincidence that a couple of decades later page layout, photo-editing and typography harbored the first mass oriented implementation of digital imaging tools. The advertising and magazine industry jumped at the chance to have one machine that could handle all these different crafts and it has never looked back. Thus, "photo-collage" represented in the MOCA collection by the work of artists Damnengine , Larry Hopewell , and Gulner Guvenc has become the most prevalent kind of digital art exhibited anywhere, today. Collage is most often the kind of art that people seek to do with their new computers and, as such, has formed a populist wave of art making that can hardly be ignored. DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY: Tabloid Culture Even before photography became a fine art it was a popular one. Due, in no small part, to what philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin called the "voodoo cult" of photography. That is, the ability for a photograph to freeze time and preserve people, places and events long after they disappear in the mists of memory. Therefore, the photograph, even a simple and personal snap shot, is a very potent item, whose aura in our everyday lives can surpass that of art. Of course, along with this reverence comes the reverse and the purposeful mutilation of a photograph can harbor a darker spirit. This darker spirit has become quite popular in itself as a post modern society turns to themes and activities previously considered "on the fringe". I ascribe the term "Tabloid Culture" to this type of art as a nod to the marginality from which it is ascending and to the media which has made it so relatively accessible. And, of course, digital tools are there helping it happen. The highest form of this art is displayed in the MOCA galleries of Alessandro Bavari , David Ho , and Shannon Hourigan . And, while these artists use techniques and tools outside of the range of simple photo-manipulation, their intent to create dark, mysterious, uncomfortable and often allegorical illustrations with amazing photographic realism is quite evident and striking. On the other hand, the dark collages of Shannon Hourigan retain more of the character of a direct photograph. In doing so, Hourigan manages to create work that fully exploits this voodoo concept of photography and in the disfiguration and distortions of her photgraphic images questions of violence, body image and self mutilation are given full voice. THE QUEST FOR PRESENCE: Fractals In and of itself, however, paint is paint. Photography and even collage are no longer anything new. And, since we already know that art is not about the tools that we use to make it; we might rightfully ask, so what's new about digital art? For well over two hundred years the world of fine art and its counterpart in academia have been driven by the notion of stylistic identification and innovation thus creating the age of "isms". Art work has come to be judged either by how well it fits into an existing style, or is favored most when it breaks beyond these prized barriers and delivers something all together and strikingly new. For digital art to join in this time honored game, to become present in the world of Fine Arts, it must move beyond mimicry of traditional media and forge new visual ground. In order to survey this new territory the artist must search for those things that no other visual arts tools can do. For example, computers are number crunching machines with a propensity for diligently performing tedious tasks at lightning speeds; data in data out. This was of little value to the visual artist until 1972 when Benoit Mandelbrot brought together his own scattered research in "self similarity and iteration" and named it "fractal geometry". Almost instantly from that point through today the science of mapping the hidden geometry of nature has been a visual matter. Fractal geometry provides the mathematical algorithms that are the virtual backbone of many of the unique tools that digital image editing and generating software are built upon. For certain artists this means the creation of imagery that is both excitingly new and strangely familiar as seen in the MOCA galleries of artists Janet Parke and Karin Kuhlmann . Fractals are patently beautiful with breathtaking depth, sumptuous color, dynamic flowing lines that tickle and delight the eye. In their repetition of forms is suggested the math of the eternal. As such, fractal imagery is often powerful and always seductive. And, yet fractals while wildly varied are still highly recognizable "formula based" images. This makes working with fractals some of the edgiest digital work being done, because it yields imagery that can so easily seem trite and lacking in human warmth, putting itself directly on a collision course with those that fear mechanization of art. How does one make art that springs from the cold soul of the motherboard and yet carries the caress of a human hand and heart? Integrative Digital Art The answer to this challenge comes in another of the computer's innate abilities, that being the ability, by the reduction of all sorts of input into a homogeneous data flow, to integrate and synthesize widely divergent material into a single work In other words, not just paint or photo or fractal, but a fluid synthesis of all sorts and kinds of media, materials, processes and styles. This "Integrative Digital Art" yields some highly personal and varied approaches to how the art is made, as well as, how it looks. It brings into play all the imaging sources, drawing tools, automated filters, traditional and digital processes that one can summon. It explodes and expands "multi-media" by being, virtually, every media. There are many strong examples of this in the MOCA collection by artists such as, Hans Deiter Grossmann , Afanassy Pud , John Clive , Kent Oberheu , Kolja Tatic , Ileana Frometa Grillo , and Orna Ben-Shoshan . You may notice that none of these artist's works looks like the next. There is, therefore, no discernible emergent style. So, if we are about playing the same, age old game of stylistic innovation visa vi the established world of "Fine Art"; even this genre of digital art has reason for being marginalized by "the big show". THE TYRANNY OF NEWNESS No artist sets out to create a style. Often one is directed by technique or philosophy or a new tool to innovate, but the recognition of a style has more to do with the critics, galleries and academicians that struggle to ascribe words, labels, context and a re-sale price, after the fact, to the artist's work. All well and good, until the drive to innovate new styles becomes a major criterion for evaluating the relative worth of any particular work of art. Or, until a whole art form is proclaimed "dead" by virtue of apparent inability to adequately perform on the stage of stylistic innovation. Then, we must question if, rather than the art being dead, perhaps it is the person looking at the art that has succumb. With styles being the actual purview of the critic, we might proclaim it is the critic and not the artist that has failed to create something new. In truth, we may not be able to adequately address the question, "what's new", in two dimensional inanimate art simply by employing digital tools. Today, looking at the range of such art, all of which can be pigeon-holed neatly into this "ism" or that, regardless of the tools employed; we may have to consider that, in a broad sense, things have run their course stylistically. Which is to say that the "stylemakers", the critics, galleries and academicians, have created a sufficient number of broadly defined styles as to fit all occasions and visual statements. So that one can, with a good degree of jaded safety, say, "I've seen that, we've been there." Consider that art commentary and marketing based on stylistic trends has died. Perhaps we have entered an era where art commentary must become as nuanced and as sensitive to individual perception as the artists themselves. Art is no longer a matter of this style or that style. It is a thick, murky, strong brew of people and tools and diverse expression. Style has become just another tool of that expression and since art is not about the tools used to make it, art criticism can no longer be an evaluation based on style or genre. Instead of a dead-end, I see a great "jumping-off-point" wherein the strength and worth of a visual statement can be evaluated based on one's skill to manipulate line, composition, color, form, rhythm...plus an artist�s sensitivity in selecting and manipulating a visual style along with the other tools used to create a particular work of Art. In his book, "The Art Spirit" Robert Henri states, "...there is the new movement. There always has been the new movement and there always will be the new movement.. It is necessary to pierce to the core to get at the value of a movement and not be confused by its sensational exterior." In the case of visual digital art, a good indication as to the nature of this core comes by way of recent developments in music; another "digital art". Everyone is quite aware of how digital tools have revolutionized the making and distribution of popular music. There is an explosion of new music created and distributed by individuals utilizing smaller, more powerful and more affordable digital studios and tools. Driven by creativity and artistic desire without requiring "big money", mass approval and massive retun on investment, this whole movement has the "music industry" ( a close facsimile of the "Fine Arts" industrial complex) quaking in their Gucci's. In a recent NPR report, Roger Linn, inventor of digital drum pads and a session guitarist, foresees the day when "there'll be fewer professional musicians, but more people making music." In the same report, Chicago recording engineer, Steve Albini names this phenomenon "the triumph of the amateur" and notes the same trends one can observe in the visual digital arts. According to Albini this triumph of the amateur, "has led, aesthetically, to a lot of poor sounding recordings as musicians experiment with equipment without basic knowledge of audio recording. But, culturally, it has been democratizing, empowering and valuable." In terms of the craft of visual art, rules have been broken and often these new artists appear to know much more about software than art. But, the genie is out of the box and expanding creative bandwidth will always win out over perserving outmoded traditions and dogma. Don Archer, creator and chief curator for the MOCA website, sees strong evidence that the kind of digital art we see here is the most popular and widely practiced art making of all time. "Digital art needs no defense. It's here, it's pervasive, it's succeeded in encouraging digital artists by the tens of thousands all over the world. It is the most popular art form ever. It should be taken for granted. It does not need the imprimatur of fine art critics, which will come anyway." THE ROAD AHEAD: A Futurist's View That we find very little of the two dimensional visual digital art that I have been focused on here in this essay in the established fine arts galleries and magazines is strongly indicative of where the truly vast market and validation for this work lies. It is "out there" in that much larger world which has, for so long, been disenfranchised. Ahead lies an even more far reaching period of democratization and the advancement of new markets, modes of display and distribution that will certainly revolutionize all aspects of what we now call "art". Style will become a tool for expression, not opression. Art will become, simultaneously more personal and more pervasive. In this essay I have limited my comments to specific "styles" of one particular art form, this is not to say that digital tools will not lay the basis for, as of yet, unimagined new "art forms". As we more fully realize the consequences of a media which can integrate widely different input into a unifying form of binary expression and translate that expression into a myriad of perceived forms, we will arrive at a whole new terrain for, not only art, but how we perceive and experience our own consciousness. We will have "symbiotic art", capable of expressing color as sound and motion as music. The observer will become a functionary of the art itself and the designer will become a poet of the senses. With this will come the awareness that we already live in a virtual world transmitted to us by our evolved senses that, after all, only give us a single version of what remains, without us to observe it, a basically undifferentiated universe of electromagnetic waves, particles and constant energetic motion and change. JD Jarvis November, 2002 Las Cruces, NM JD Jarvis website

17 Digital Artist Interview Questions and Answers

Learn what skills and qualities interviewers are looking for from a digital artist, what questions you can expect, and how you should go about answering them.

A digital artist is a creative professional who uses computer software to design and create two-dimensional and three-dimensional images. These artists work in a variety of industries, including advertising, gaming, movies, and television.

If you’re a digital artist, you may be wondering how to prepare for a job interview. After all, your portfolio is likely to speak for itself. However, you can still expect to be asked a few questions about your experience and artistic process. In this guide, we’ve compiled a list of common digital artist interview questions and answers to help you prepare for your next job interview.

Are you comfortable working on your own or do you prefer to work in a team?

What are some of the most important skills for a digital artist, how do you stay creative when working on repetitive projects, what is your experience with using 3d modeling software, provide an example of a time when you had to use your critical thinking skills to solve a problem., if given the opportunity, would you like to work remotely or do you prefer to work in an office setting, what would you do if you were assigned a project that was outside of your area of expertise, how well do you communicate without using words (i.e. through visuals or animations), do you have any experience with virtual reality or augmented reality technologies, when working on a team, how do you handle constructive criticism from others, we want to attract younger audiences. how would you go about creating digital content that appeals to younger people, describe your process for creating a piece of digital artwork., what makes you stand out from other digital artists, which digital art tools do you wish you had more experience with, what do you think is the most important thing to remember when creating digital artwork for a brand, how often do you update your skills and knowledge as a digital artist, there is a bug in one of your animations. how do you handle this situation.

This question helps employers determine if you are a self-starter or need to work in a team environment. They want to know that you can be productive and get your work done independently, but also enjoy collaborating with others. Your answer should show that you have experience working both on your own and as part of a team.

Example: “I am comfortable working on my own, however I prefer to work in a team setting. In my last role, I was the only digital artist, so I had to do everything myself. However, I really enjoyed collaborating with other artists and designers on projects. I find it more beneficial to collaborate with others because we can bounce ideas off each other and learn from one another.”

Employers ask this question to make sure you have the skills needed for the job. They want someone who is creative, organized and able to work well with others. When answering this question, think about which skills are most important to your success as a digital artist. Consider including some of these skills in your answer:

Creativity Communication Organization Example: “The two most important skills for a digital artist are creativity and communication. Creativity is essential because it allows me to come up with new ideas and solutions to problems. I also need to be able to communicate clearly with my team members so we can all work together effectively.”

Employers may ask this question to see if you have strategies for staying motivated and productive when working on repetitive projects. Use your answer to highlight your creativity, problem-solving skills and ability to adapt to different types of work.

Example: “I find that the best way to stay creative is by finding new ways to approach my work. I try to switch up my workflow every few months so that I’m not doing the same thing over and over again. For example, I might start a project using traditional media but then transition to digital media halfway through. This helps me avoid getting bored with the same type of work.”

This question can help the interviewer determine your experience level with digital art. They may ask you about specific software programs to see if you have used them before and how much experience you have using them. Use your answer to share which 3D modeling software you are familiar with and explain what projects you’ve worked on that involved this software.

Example: “I am experienced in using several different types of 3D modeling software, including Autodesk Maya, Blender and Cinema 4D. In my last role as a graphic designer, I primarily used Maya for creating digital artwork. I also used it to create 3D models for print ads and other marketing materials. I used Cinema 4D when designing websites to add animation elements.”

Employers ask this question to learn more about your problem-solving skills. They want to know that you can use your creativity and critical thinking abilities to solve problems in the workplace. When answering this question, think of a time when you used your critical thinking skills to solve a problem at work or school.

Example: “At my last job, I was tasked with creating an advertisement for our company’s new product. The client wanted me to create a digital ad that would be eye-catching and engaging. After speaking with the client, I learned they wanted something fun and colorful. However, they also wanted it to have a serious tone. I decided to create a digital ad that had bright colors but also included some text. This helped convey the seriousness of the product while still being visually appealing.”

This question is an opportunity to show your interviewer that you are a self-motivated and independent worker. You can answer honestly, but also consider the company culture when deciding whether or not to mention remote work opportunities in your response.

Example: “I prefer working remotely because I find it more productive for me. However, I am also very comfortable collaborating with others on projects and would be happy to do so in an office setting if needed.”

Employers may ask this question to see how you handle challenges. Use your answer to show that you are willing to learn new things and develop your skills. Explain what steps you would take to complete the project while learning from a more experienced colleague or supervisor.

Example: “If I were assigned a project outside of my area of expertise, I would first try to find someone who could mentor me on the task. If there was no one available, I would make sure to thoroughly read through all of the instructions before starting work. I would also schedule time each day to practice working on similar projects so I could gain experience in the subject matter.”

This question can help the interviewer understand how you might work with other team members and clients. Use examples from your past experience to show that you’re able to communicate effectively without using words.

Example: “I’ve worked on projects where I was the only artist, but also in teams of up to five artists. In both situations, I learned how to use visuals and animations to communicate my ideas to others. For example, when working alone, I would create a storyboard for each animation or scene I wanted to create. Then, I would share it with my client so they could provide feedback. When working in a team, I would create a similar document, but then we would discuss our ideas together before creating the final product.”

Digital artists often need to be familiar with emerging technologies that can help them create more realistic and immersive digital experiences. Employers ask this question to make sure you have the necessary skills to succeed in their role. In your answer, share what experience you have with these technologies. Explain how it helped you complete a project or use it as an example of why you would like to learn more about virtual reality and augmented reality.

Example: “I’ve had some experience working with virtual reality and augmented reality technologies. I worked on a project for a client who wanted to create a VR experience where users could explore a new city. I used Unity 3D software to build out the VR environment. Then, I integrated Google Cardboard technology so people could view the VR content using their phones.”

As a digital artist, you may work with other designers and artists to create the best possible product. Employers ask this question to make sure you can collaborate well with others. Use your answer to show that you are open to feedback and suggestions from others. Explain that you value input from everyone on the team.

Example: “I love working in teams because it allows me to learn new things from my colleagues. I find constructive criticism very helpful when working on projects. I always try to take note of any advice or tips my teammates give me. This helps me improve my skills as a digital artist and makes me more valuable to the company.”

This question is a great way to show your creativity and how you can use digital tools to create content that appeals to specific audiences. When answering this question, it’s important to highlight the importance of creating content for different age groups while also showing how you would appeal to younger people.

Example: “I think it’s really important to create content that appeals to all ages because it allows brands to reach more customers. However, I do believe there are ways to attract younger audiences through digital art. For example, when working on a project for my previous employer, we were tasked with creating an online game that appealed to children. We used bright colors and fun characters to make the game appealing to kids.”

This question can help the interviewer understand how you approach your work and what steps you take to complete a project. Use examples from past projects to describe your process, including any tools or techniques you use to create digital art.

Example: “I start by researching my subject matter and gathering inspiration for the piece I’m working on. Then, I sketch out some ideas using pencil and paper before transferring them to the computer. Once I have an idea of what I want the final product to look like, I begin creating it digitally using software that allows me to manipulate colors and textures. This is when I add in details and make sure everything looks exactly as I envisioned.”

Employers ask this question to learn more about your unique skills and talents. They want to know what makes you a valuable asset to their company. When answering this question, think of two or three things that make you stand out from other digital artists. These can be specific skills or experiences that are relevant to the job.

Example: “I am an extremely organized person, which is why I have always been successful as a digital artist. In my previous role, I was responsible for creating all of the marketing materials for our client’s website. Because I am so detail-oriented, I managed to create everything on time while still maintaining high quality. This helped me win over my client and get them to refer me to others.”

This question can help the interviewer understand your experience level and how you learn new skills. Use this opportunity to show that you are eager to learn more about digital art tools, including which ones you have already mastered.

Example: “I wish I had more experience with 3D modeling software because it’s a skill I would like to add to my portfolio. I am currently taking an online course on Blender, which is one of the most popular free 3D modeling programs. I also want to expand my knowledge of animation software so I can create more complex animations for clients.”

This question can help the interviewer determine how much you know about working with a brand and what your priorities are when creating digital artwork. Use examples from past experiences to show that you understand the importance of meeting deadlines, maintaining quality standards and collaborating with others.

Example: “I think it’s important to remember that every piece of work I create for a brand is an extension of their brand identity. This means that my primary goal should be to make sure that everything I produce looks professional and fits in with the rest of the brand’s marketing materials. It also means that I need to meet any deadlines set by the client and maintain high-quality standards throughout the entire process.”

Employers want to know that you are committed to your career and continually learning new skills. They may ask this question to see if you have a plan for continuing your education throughout your career as a digital artist. In your answer, explain how you stay up-to-date on the latest trends in your industry. You can also mention any certifications or training programs you’ve completed recently.

Example: “I am always looking for ways to improve my skills as a digital artist. I regularly attend conferences and workshops where I learn from other professionals. I also subscribe to several design blogs so I can keep up with the latest software releases. I find these resources helpful because they allow me to try out new techniques before using them in my own work.”

Bugs are common in digital animation. Employers ask this question to make sure you know how to handle bugs and other technical issues that may arise during your workday. In your answer, explain what steps you would take to fix the bug. Show that you have experience with fixing bugs or other technical problems.

Example: “I would first try to figure out why there is a bug in the animation. If I can’t find an easy solution, then I will contact my supervisor for help. Once they tell me how to fix it, I will go back into the program and edit the animation. This process takes time, but I am used to working through these types of situations.”

17 Retail Coordinator Interview Questions and Answers

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82 Questions to Ask about Art

Inside: Why classroom art discussion is a vital part of art education and 82 questions about art you can use in your classroom.

If you are stumped about how to lead a discussion about a work of art, use this list of art questions to give you some ideas!

As art teachers, we know the importance of creativity and the joy of making something with your own hands, but we also know the power of looking at the artworks of others.

Looking at art is an emotional, independent experience. Each person looking at a work of art will view it through the lens of their life and draw different meanings based on what they see. Talking about art allows us to break free of our solitary interpretations and uncover new insights.

Classroom art discussions are a launching pad for creativity, collaboration, and cognition. By exposing our students to works of art, giving them the space to examine their reactions, and opening a dialogue to share their thoughts, we help them develop empathy, connect with history, flex their critical thinking and observation skills, and consider the human spirit.

If you haven’t done it before, starting a classroom art discussion can be intimidating, but the benefits are worth overcoming the nerves. Below you’ll find 82 questions you can use to start and extend conversations about works of art with your classes. If you’d like more guidance, check out my five tips for leading a meaningful classroom art discussion .

Grab this art questions list and an artwork from 10 Artworks Perfect for an Art Criticism Lesson for older students or 20 Great Artworks to Look at with Young Kids for younger children, and start talking about art with your students!

Pair these questions with art cards  for a variety of engaging art appreciation activities! Learn how to make a DIY art collection and start a weekly masterpiece presentation in your classroom in this post .

Want all of these art questions plus printable question cards in a free PDF download?

Free Resource!

82 Questions About Art

82 questions you can use to start and extend conversations about works of art with your classroom. Free download includes a list plus individual question cards perfect for laminating!

Questions About Art

• What’s going on in this artwork?
• What was your first reaction to this artwork? Why do you think you had the reaction? 
• Does your opinion about the artwork change the longer you look at it? Why?
• Describe the lines in this artwork
• Describe the colors in the artwork
• Which area of the artwork is emphasized by the artist? Why?
• Which area of the artwork is most important? Why?
• How did this artist use space? ( Space in Art Examples )
• How did the artist use balance?  ( Artworks that Use Balance )
• How did the artist use proportion?  ( Examples of Proportion in Art )
• How does your eye move through the artwork? What choices did the artist make to make that happen?
• Close your eyes and describe the artwork from memory. Why did you remember what you remembered? Why did you forget what you forgot?
• How would you describe this artwork to someone who has never seen it?
• What elements of this painting seem real?
• What adjectives would you use to describe this artwork?
• What verbs would you use to describe this artwork?
• What elements seem dreamlike or imaginary?
• What is strange about this painting?
• What is mysterious about this artwork?
• What is normal about this artwork?
• What is boring about this artwork?
• Why is this artwork not boring to look at?
• What is exciting about this artwork?
• If this painting had sound effects, what would they sound like? ( More activities about art senses )
• If this artwork was a brand, what would be its slogan?
• What is missing from this artwork?
• If this artwork were music, what would it sound like?
• If this artwork could dance, what song would it dance to?
• What do we know about the artist after viewing this artwork?
• If you could ask the artist a question, what would you ask him/her?
• Who do you think was this artwork created for? Why do you say that?
• How do you think the artist feels about the final product?
• How do you think this artwork was made?
• Why do you think this artist created this work?
• What do you think this artist is trying to say in this artwork? What is the meaning or message?
• What’s the story being told, if any?
• What do you think happened before this scene?
• What do you think happened next?
• What emotions do you notice in the artwork?
• What emotions do you feel when looking at this?
• How do you think the artist was feeling when he created this artwork?
• How did the artist use line, shape, and color to contribute to the mood or meaning?
• What is the title? How does the title contribute to your understanding of the meaning?
• What title would you give this artwork?
• What symbols do you notice in the artwork?
• What juxtapositions do you notice?
• Put your body into the pose of some element of this artwork.  How does it feel to be in that position?
• What would it feel like to be in this artwork?
• What does this artwork remind you of? Why?
• How do you personally relate to/connect with this picture?
• How can you connect this artwork to your own life?
• How might you feel differently about the world after looking at this artwork?
• Why do you think you should be learning about/looking at this artwork?
• Do you want to see this artwork again? Why?
• What do you want to remember about this artwork?
• What do you want to forget about this artwork?
• Who do you know that would really like this artwork? Why would they like it?
• Who do you know that would really hate this artwork? Why would they hate it?
• What do you like about this artwork?
• What do you dislike about this artwork?
• What is beautiful about this artwork?
• Why would someone want to steal this artwork?
• If you could change this artwork, how would you change it? Why?
• What does this artwork say about the culture in which is was produced?
• How do you think this artwork was used by the people who made it? What was its function?
• Was this intended to be a work of art or not? Why do you think that? How does that impact your understanding of the artwork?
• What does this painting say about the world in which we live?
• What does this artwork teach us about the past?
• How does this artwork teach us about the future?
• What was happening in history when this artwork was made? How does that change your understanding of the artwork?
• What are the values and beliefs of the culture in which this artwork was made?
• How might your interpretation of this artwork be different from someone in another culture?
• If you could ask this artwork a question, what would you ask it?
• If this artwork had eyes, what would it see?
• If this artwork were a person, what would they want to eat for lunch?
• If this artwork were a person, what would they look like?
• If this artwork were a person, what would their personality be?
• If the art could talk, what would it say?
• What would this artwork want to do when it grows up?
• If this artwork could travel anywhere in the world, where would it go? Why?
• If this painting were a person, what job/career would it want to have?
• What is this artwork afraid of?

Questions about Art PDF Contents:

• 82 Questions About Art (List)
• 82 Questions About Art (Printable Index Cards)
• Links to Artwork Suggestions

Printing Instructions:

This post contains Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Download the Printables

This list is available to download in two formats. The first is the list formatted to print in a pdf (2 pages). The second is the questions formatted to print on cardstock to cut out and laminate . (They are designed with this Avery (8577 using Template 8387) Postcard template , so you could also buy the Avery cards and print on them to make it easier).

If you are a member of The Curated Connections Library , you can get this lesson and all of my other resources for one monthly  fee. Find out more information at this link .

This article was originally posted on August 31, 2015.

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Reader Interactions

30 comments.

February 7, 2016 at 7:51 pm

Thank you, Cindy. As a middle school art teacher, your prompts are GOLD!!!

February 8, 2016 at 1:57 pm

Thank you! 🙂

September 30, 2017 at 12:52 pm

Great guiding questions. Thank you!

October 1, 2017 at 6:01 pm

You’re welcome!

November 25, 2018 at 1:42 pm

Thank very much for the 82 question. I will take time to look at each one of them.

May 11, 2020 at 1:46 am

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October 18, 2021 at 1:15 pm

All docents at the Tucson Museum of Art are receiving a “post Covid” refresher course – these 82 questions are required homework. The effort and insights of the author (Cindy?) are appreciated and currently being put to good use. Thank you.

October 22, 2021 at 8:17 am

That is so awesome to hear! Thank you.

July 21, 2020 at 9:27 am

It’s interesting to know that appreciating art can be an emotional and independent experience. I’m taking Engineering courses right now but visiting a museum once with my friend made me realize how wonderful art is, even if it doesn’t have any direct relation to my chosen degree. It might be a good idea to look into realistic sculptures and start studying art from there.

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January 20, 2021 at 12:21 pm

So glad you enjoyed it!

January 18, 2021 at 11:24 am

Hi Cindy! I have tried to download these and keep receiving the art appreciation free resources. I am hoping to utilize them for some parent engagement with my students’ artwork. If you are still able to share the questions about art cards, I would appreciate it tons! Thank you!

January 20, 2021 at 12:40 pm

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March 7, 2021 at 9:52 am

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March 9, 2021 at 12:29 pm

The glitch is fixed! You can now download using the button.

March 21, 2021 at 9:43 pm

It helps me a lot. Thank you.

March 23, 2021 at 11:46 am

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October 3, 2021 at 8:29 pm

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October 8, 2021 at 7:15 am

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March 2, 2022 at 1:53 pm

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March 4, 2022 at 8:20 am

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September 22, 2023 at 5:16 am

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November 16, 2023 at 11:26 pm

It’s blissful, insightful and enjoyable. This work is artistically done and I appreciate your creativity. Thank you!

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So glad you found us!

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Tech as Art: Commissioned Essays from Arts Practitioners

The following essays were commissioned as a companion to the 2021 report,  Tech as Art: Supporting Artists Who Use Technology as a Creative Medium . Focused to raise visibility of current “Tech As Art” discourse occurring within the larger landscape of contemporary arts, each essay offers compelling provocations uplifting the idea that an equitable, resilient, and thriving arts and cultural ecosystem includes deepened support for artistic practices focused on technology as a creative medium. Alongside providing further context for the arts and cultural sector, these essays offer new perspectives and considerations for intersecting industry leaders in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), to discover shared goals and priorities with tech-focused artists and related practices. These essays are part of an Arts & Technology Field Scan conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts, in partnership with the Ford Foundation and the Knight Foundation.

“ Recoding the Master’s Tools: Artists Remake Systems of Oppression and Extraction in Technology ” by Vanessa Chang

“ How Artists Can Bridge the Digital Divide and Reimagine Humanity ” by Agnes Chavez

“ Teaching the Co-Creators of a New Economy from Lincoln, Nebraska ” by Megan Elliott

“ Artist Perspective: Building Afrocentric Technoculture and Community ” by Ari Melenciano

“ Space, Time, Sustainability, Community: Giving Digital Artists What They Need ” by Stephanie Pereira

“ How the Arts Sector Can Support Transformational Technology ” by Omari Rush

“ Funder Perspective: Broadening Support for Arts and Technology ” by Eleanor Savage

“ Future World-building Depends on Artists and Collaborative Networks ” by Kamal Sinclair

“ Where Is the Public Discourse Around Art and Technology? ” by Hrag Vartanian

“ A Call-to-Action in STEAM Education ” by S. Craig Watkins

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Home — Essay Samples — Information Science and Technology — Digital Era — Development Of Art In The Digital Era

Development of Art in The Digital Era

• Categories: Digital Era Impact of Technology

About this sample

Words: 1113 |

Published: Feb 8, 2022

Words: 1113 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

Works Cited

• Davis, D. (1995). The work of art in the age of digital reproduction. Retrieved from https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/art-and-electronic-media
• Goodman, C. (1987). Digital visions: Computers and art. New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams.
• Innocenti, P. (2012). Digital art preservation: A matter of trust. Journal of Conservation and Museum Studies, 10(1), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.5334/jcms.1021203
• Manovich, L. (2002). The language of new media. MIT Press.
• Paul, C. (2003). Digital art. Thames and Hudson.
• Sternberg, J. (2000). How digital art history? International Journal for Digital Art History, 1(1), 1-14.
• Stallabrass, J. (2003). Internet art: The online clash of culture and commerce. Tate Publishing.
• Tavinor, G. (2009). The art of videogames. Wiley-Blackwell.
• Weibel, P. (1997). Art at the turn of the millennium. Thames and Hudson.
• Wolff, J. (2011). The social production of art (2nd ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.

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Art History Analysis – Formal Analysis and Stylistic Analysis

Typically in an art history class the main essay students will need to write for a final paper or for an exam is a formal or stylistic analysis.

A  formal analysis  is just what it sounds like – you need to analyze the form of the artwork. This includes the individual design elements – composition, color, line, texture, scale, contrast, etc. Questions to consider in a formal analysis is how do all these elements come together to create this work of art? Think of formal analysis in relation to literature – authors give descriptions of characters or places through the written word. How does an artist convey this same information?

Organize your information and focus on each feature before moving onto the text – it is not ideal to discuss color and jump from line to then in the conclusion discuss color again. First summarize the overall appearance of the work of art – is this a painting? Does the artist use only dark colors? Why heavy brushstrokes? etc and then discuss details of the object – this specific animal is gray, the sky is missing a moon , etc. Again, it is best to be organized and focused in your writing – if you discuss the animals and then the individuals and go back to the animals you run the risk of making your writing unorganized and hard to read. It is also ideal to discuss the focal of the piece – what is in the center? What stands out the most in the piece or takes up most of the composition?

A  stylistic approach  can be described as an indicator of unique characteristics that analyzes and uses the formal elements (2-D: Line, color, value, shape and 3-D all of those and mass).The point of style is to see all the commonalities in a person’s works, such as the use of paint and brush strokes in Van Gogh’s work. Style can distinguish an artist’s work from others and within their own timeline, geographical regions, etc.

Methods & Theories To Consider:

Expressionism

Instructuralism

Postmodernism

Social Art History

Biographical Approach

Poststructuralism

Museum Studies

Visual Cultural Studies

Stylistic Analysis Example:

The following is a brief stylistic analysis of two Greek statues, an example of how style has changed because of the “essence of the age.”  Over the years, sculptures of women started off as being plain and fully clothed with no distinct features, to the beautiful Venus/Aphrodite figures most people recognize today. In the mid-seventh century to the early fifth, life-sized standing marble statues of young women, often elaborately dress in gaily painted garments were created known as korai. The earliest korai is a Naxian women to Artemis. The statue wears a tight-fitted, belted peplos, giving the body a very plain look. The earliest korai wore the simpler Dorian peplos, which was a heavy woolen garment. From about 530, most wear a thinner, more elaborate, and brightly painted Ionic linen and himation. A largely contrasting Greek statue to the korai is the Venus de Milo. The Venus from head to toe is six feet seven inches tall.  Her hips suggest that she has had several children. Though her body shows to be heavy, she still seems to almost be weightless. Viewing the Venus de Milo, she changes from side to side. From her right side she seems almost like a pillar and her leg bears most of the weight. She seems be firmly planted into the earth, and since she is looking at the left, her big features such as her waist define her. The Venus de Milo had a band around her right bicep. She had earrings that were brutally stolen, ripping her ears away. Venus was noted for loving necklaces, so it is very possibly she would have had one. It is also possible she had a tiara and bracelets. Venus was normally defined as “golden,” so her hair would have been painted. Two statues in the same region, have throughout history, changed in their style.

Compare and Contrast Essay

Most introductory art history classes will ask students to write a compare and contrast essay about two pieces – examples include comparing and contrasting a medieval to a renaissance painting. It is always best to start with smaller comparisons between the two works of art such as the medium of the piece. Then the comparison can include attention to detail so use of color, subject matter, or iconography. Do the same for contrasting the two pieces – start small. After the foundation is set move on to the analysis and what these comparisons or contrasting material mean – ‘what is the bigger picture here?’ Consider why one artist would wish to show the same subject matter in a different way, how, when, etc are all questions to ask in the compare and contrast essay. If during an exam it would be best to quickly outline the points to make before tackling writing the essay.

Compare and Contrast Example:

Stele of Hammurabi  from Susa (modern Shush, Iran), ca. 1792 – 1750 BCE, Basalt, height of stele approx. 7’ height of relief 28’

Stele, relief sculpture, Art as propaganda – Hammurabi shows that his law code is approved by the gods, depiction of land in background , Hammurabi on the same place of importance as the god, etc.

Top of this stele shows the relief image of Hammurabi receiving the law code from Shamash, god of justice, Code of Babylonian social law, only two figures shown , different area and time period, etc.

Stele of Naram-sin , Sippar Found at Susa  c. 2220 - 2184  bce. Limestone, height 6'6"

Stele, relief sculpture, Example of propaganda because the ruler (like the Stele of Hammurabi) shows his power through divine authority, Naramsin is the main character due to his large size, depiction of land in background, etc.

Akkadian art, made of limestone, the stele commemorates a victory of

Naramsin, multiple figures are shown specifically soldiers, different area and time period, etc.

Iconography

Regardless of what essay approach you take in class it is absolutely necessary to understand how to analyze the iconography of a work of art and to incorporate into your paper. Iconography is defined as subject matter,  what  the image means. For example, why do things such as a small dog in a painting in early Northern Renaissance paintings represent sexuality?  Additionally, how can an individual perhaps identify these motifs that keep coming up?

The following is a list of symbols and their meaning in  Marriage a la Mode  by William Hogarth (1743) that is a series of six paintings that show the story of marriage in Hogarth’s eyes.

• Man has pockets turned out symbolizing he has lost money and was recently in a fight by the state of his clothes.
• Lap dog shows loyalty but sniffs at woman’s hat in the husband’s pocket showing sexual exploits.
• Black dot on husband’s neck believed to be symbol of syphilis.
•  Mantel full of ugly Chinese porcelain statues symbolizing that the couple has no class.
• Butler had to go pay bills, you can tell this by the distasteful look on his face and that his pockets are stuffed with bills and papers.
• Card game just finished up, women has directions to game under foot, shows her easily cheating nature.
• Paintings of saints line a wall of the background room, isolated from the living, shows the couple’s complete disregard to faith and religion. 
• The dangers of sexual excess are underscored in the Hograth by placing Cupid among ruins, foreshadowing the inevitable ruin of the marriage.
• Eventually the series (other five paintings) shows that the woman has an affair, the men duel and die, the woman hangs herself and the father takes her ring off her finger symbolizing the one thing he could salvage from the marriage. 

Defining Art Criticism

• Art criticism is responding to, interpreting meaning, and making critical judgments about specific works of art.
• Art critics help viewers perceive, interpret, and judge artworks.
• Critics tend to focus more on modern and contemporary art from cultures close to their own.
• Art historians tend to study works made in cultures that are more distant in time and space.
• When initially introduced to art criticism, many people associate negative connotations with the word "criticism."

A professional art critic may be

• a newspaper reporter assigned to the art beat,
• a scholar writing for professional journals or texts, or
• an artist writing about other artists.

Journalistic criticism  –

• Written for the general public, includes reviews of art exhibitions in galleries and museums.
• (Suggestions that journalistic criticism deals with art mainly to the extent that it is newsworthy.)

Scholarly art criticism

• Written for a more specialized art audience and appears in art journals.
• Scholar-critics may be college and university professors or museum curators, often with particular knowledge about a style, period, medium, or artist.

FORMAL ANALYSIS

• Four levels of formal analysis, which you can use to explain a work of art:

1. Description   = pure description of the object without value judgments,   analysis, or interpretation.

• It answers the question, "What do you see?"
• The various elements that constitute a description include:

a. Form of art whether architecture, sculpture, painting or one of the minor arts

b. Medium of work whether clay, stone, steel, paint, etc., and technique (tools used)

c. Size and scale of work (relationship to person and/or frame and/or context)

d. Elements or general shapes (architectural structural system) within the composition, including building of post-lintel construction or painting with several figures lined up in a row; identification of objects

e. Description of axis whether vertical, diagonal, horizontal, etc.

f. Description of line, including contour as soft, planar, jagged, etc.

g. Description of how line describes shape and space (volume); distinguish between lines of objects and lines of composition, e.g., thick, thin, variable, irregular, intermittent, indistinct, etc.

h. Relationships between shapes, e.g., large and small, overlapping, etc.

i. Description of color and color scheme = palette

j. Texture of surface or other comments about execution of work

k. Context of object: original location and date

2. Analysis = determining what the features suggest and deciding why the artist used such features to convey specific ideas.

• It answers the question, "How did the artist do it?"
• The various elements that constitute analysis include:

a. Determination of subject matter through naming iconographic elements, e.g., historical event, allegory, mythology, etc.

b. Selection of most distinctive features or characteristics whether line, shape, color, texture, etc.

c. Analysis of the principles of design or composition, e.g., stable,

repetitious, rhythmic, unified, symmetrical, harmonious, geometric, varied, chaotic, horizontal or vertically oriented, etc.

d. Discussion of how elements or structural system contribute to appearance of image or function

e. Analysis of use of light and role of color, e.g., contrasty, shadowy,

illogical, warm, cool, symbolic, etc.

f. Treatment of space and landscape, both real and illusionary (including use of perspective), e.g., compact, deep, shallow, naturalistic, random

g. Portrayal of movement and how it is achieved

h. Effect of particular medium(s) used

i. Your perceptions of balance, proportion and scale (relationships of each part of the composition to the whole and to each other part) and your emotional

j. Reaction to object or monument

3. Interpretation = establishing the broader context for this type of art.

• It answers the question, "Why did the artist create it and what does it mean
• The various elements that constitute interpretation include:

a. Main idea, overall meaning of the work.

b. Interpretive Statement: Can I express what I think the artwork is about in one sentence?

c. Evidence: What evidence inside or outside the artwork supports my interpretation?

4. Judgment: Judging a piece of work means giving it rank in relation to other works and of course considering a very important aspect of the visual arts; its originality.

• Is it a good artwork?
• Criteria: What criteria do I think are most appropriate for judging the artwork?
• Evidence: What evidence inside or outside the artwork relates to each criterion?
• Judgment: Based on the criteria and evidence, what is my judgment about the quality of the artwork?

Barrett's Principles of Interpretation

• Artworks have "aboutness" and demand interpretation.
• Interpretations are persuasive arguments.
• Some interpretations are better than others.
• Good interpretations of art tell more about the artwork than they tell about the critic.
• Feelings are guides to interpretations.
• There can be different, competing, and contradictory interpretations of the same artwork.
• Interpretations are often based on a worldview.
• Interpretations are not so much absolutely right, but more or less reasonable, convincing, enlightening, and informative.
• Interpretations can be judged by coherence, correspondence, and inclusiveness.
• An artwork is not necessarily about what the artist wanted it to be about.
• A critic ought not to be the spokesperson for the artist.
• Interpretations ought to present the work in its best rather than its weakest light.
• The objects of interpretation are artworks, not artists.

Art Criticism

• internet art

Ways to Describe Art

General Information

In many cases, this information can be found on the label or a quick google search.

• Artist or Architect
• Technique and Medium (exp. Sculpture, Photograph, Painting, Installation, etc.)
• Subject Matter (Who or What is Represented?)

Ways to Describe Form

• Line (straight, curved, angular, flowing, horizontal, vertical, diagonal, contour, thick, thin, implied etc.)
• Shape (what shapes are created and how)
• Light and Value (source, flat, strong, contrasting, even, values, emphasis, shadows)
• Color (primary, secondary, mixed, complimentary, warm, cool, decorative, values)
• Texture and Pattern (real, implied, repeating)
• Space (depth, overlapping, kinds of perspective)
• Time and Motion
• Unity and Variety
• Balance (symmetry, asymmetry)
• Emphasis and Subordination
• Scale and Proportion (weight, how objects or figures relate to each other and the setting)
• Mass/Volume (three-dimensional art)
• Function/Setting (architecture)
• Interior/Exterior Relationship (architecture)
• Words for Art Looking for descriptive art words? Below you'll find a "masterpiece" of art words and phrases, perfect for the description of any form of art or artistic expression. Adjectives | Nouns | Verbs | Negatives | Styles & Movements | Phrases

Media @FIULibraries

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• What Is Beauty? : An Art Critic's Journey Is beauty found only in the eye of the beholder or is there something more universal we can conclude about it? In this visually stunning program, renowned art critic Matthew Collings takes us on a thoughtful and memorable exploration of beauty in art. He explores the timeless visual principles that form the basis of all great art, and which produce the rush of pleasure one experiences when encountering a beautiful painting or sculpture. Examples are drawn from the works of Piero della Francesca, Michelangelo, Magritte, Gauguin, Rauschenberg, and others. From the prehistoric cave art of the Dordogne to the masterpieces of the Renaissance to the much more debatable pleasures of contemporary art, viewers discover underlying aesthetic tenets which, in Collings's view, run through all of art history.
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20 Most Common Digital Artist Interview Questions and Answers

Common Digital Artist interview questions, how to answer them, and sample answers from a certified career coach.

Congratulations—you have an interview for a digital artist position! You’re excited, but you can also feel the butterflies in your stomach as you start to think about what questions they might ask.

Don’t worry; we’ve got you covered. Below are some common digital artist interview questions and tips on how to answer them. With these in hand, you can be sure that you’ll make a great impression when you walk into the room.

• What is your experience with digital art software such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign?
• Describe a project you have worked on that required creative problem solving.
• How do you stay up to date with the latest trends in digital art?
• Explain how you use color theory when creating artwork.
• Are you familiar with 3D modeling and animation software?
• Tell me about a time when you had to collaborate with other artists or designers to complete a project.
• What strategies do you use to ensure accuracy when working with complex designs?
• How do you handle feedback from clients or colleagues?
• Do you have any experience with motion graphics or video editing?
• Describe your process for developing concepts and ideas into finished pieces of artwork.
• What techniques do you use to create realistic textures and lighting effects?
• How do you approach creating artwork for different platforms (e.g. web, print, mobile)?
• What are some of the challenges you face when creating artwork for multiple devices?
• How do you manage deadlines and prioritize tasks when working on multiple projects at once?
• What strategies do you use to make sure your artwork looks consistent across all platforms?
• Have you ever created artwork for virtual reality applications?
• What methods do you use to optimize artwork for faster loading times?
• How do you handle copyright issues when using stock images or other resources?
• What would you do if a client asked you to create artwork outside of your usual style?
• Describe a time when you had to troubleshoot an issue with a piece of software or hardware.

1. What is your experience with digital art software such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign?

Digital art requires a specific set of skills and tools. Interviewers want to make sure you have experience with the industry standard software. They also want to know if you have experience with other technology or software that might be relevant to their projects. This question will give them an idea of how well you can use the tools at your disposal and how quickly you can learn any new software they might require.

How to Answer:

Be prepared to discuss your experience with the software listed in the job description. If you have any additional experience, such as working with 3D modeling or animation tools, be sure to mention that as well. Additionally, emphasize how quickly you can learn new programs and technologies if needed. Talk about any projects you’ve worked on where you had to learn a new technology or program in order to complete it successfully.

Example: “I have extensive experience working with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. I’ve also used 3D modeling programs such as Maya and Cinema 4D to create digital art for both web and print projects. I’m very comfortable learning new software quickly if needed, and I’m always eager to expand my skillset. For example, when I was tasked with creating a series of illustrations for a client’s website, I taught myself Sketch in order to make the project happen.”

2. Describe a project you have worked on that required creative problem solving.

Digital artists need to be able to think outside the box and come up with creative solutions to complex problems. This question allows the interviewer to get a better sense of how you work and how you approach difficult tasks. It also gives you the opportunity to demonstrate your ability to think critically and come up with unique solutions.

Begin by discussing a project you have worked on that required creative problem solving. Explain the challenge you faced and how you approached it. Describe the steps you took to come up with a solution, and explain why your approach was successful. Be sure to discuss any unique tools or techniques you used to solve the problem. Finally, emphasize the results of your work and how it helped the client achieve their goals.

Example: “I recently worked on a project for an e-commerce client where I had to create visually appealing product images using 3D rendering software. To make the images look realistic, I needed to be creative in how I used lighting and shading techniques. Additionally, since the images were going to be used online, I also had to consider compression rates and file sizes. This project required me to stay up to date with the latest trends in digital art, including new tools and technologies. Through reading blogs, attending conferences, and participating in forums and groups, I was able to gain the knowledge necessary to complete this project successfully.”

3. How do you stay up to date with the latest trends in digital art?

Staying current with the latest tools and trends in digital art is critical to success in the field. The interviewer wants to know that you are actively engaged in the digital art community and have a passion for the craft. They also want to know that you have the ability to stay ahead of the curve, as trends in digital art can change quickly.

You can start off by talking about the digital art websites and blogs you read regularly. You should also mention any conferences or workshops you attend, as well as any online courses you have taken to stay up to date on new trends in the field. Additionally, if you are an active member of any digital art forums or groups, this is a great opportunity to highlight your involvement. Finally, be sure to explain how these activities have helped you stay current with the latest tools and trends in digital art.

Example: “I stay up to date with the latest trends in digital art by regularly reading websites and blogs that focus on the field, attending conferences and workshops when I can, and taking online courses. Additionally, I’m an active member of several digital art forums and groups, which allow me to connect with other artists and learn about new techniques and tools. These activities have helped me stay current with the latest trends and keep my skills sharp.”

4. Explain how you use color theory when creating artwork.

Color theory is an important part of visual art, as it helps to create an emotional response in viewers. The interviewers want to know that you understand the principles of color theory and can use them to make your artwork more effective. They want to know that you can make conscious decisions about how to use color to create certain moods, to emphasize certain elements of the artwork, and to create a unified aesthetic.

Start by explaining the basics of color theory, such as how different colors create different emotions and how certain combinations can be used to create a unified aesthetic. Talk about how you use this knowledge when creating artwork, for example by using complementary colors to emphasize certain elements or by choosing colors that evoke a particular mood. You could also talk about any other techniques you use to make your artwork more effective, such as value or contrast.

Example: “I understand the principles of color theory and use them when creating artwork. I’m conscious of how different colors create different emotions, so I choose hues that evoke a particular mood or atmosphere. For example, if I want to create a calming effect in an image, I might use cool tones like blues and greens. If I want to emphasize certain elements, I use complementary colors to make them stand out. I also pay attention to value and contrast, as this can help draw the viewer’s eye to the focal point of the piece. Additionally, I try to keep my color palette unified by using only a few shades throughout the artwork.”

5. Are you familiar with 3D modeling and animation software?

Digital art requires a certain level of technical proficiency. Knowing the basics of 3D modeling and animation software is essential for digital artists, so the interviewer is likely trying to gauge your knowledge of the tools and technologies needed to do the job. They may also be asking this question to see how well you can adapt to new software and technologies, as digital art is an ever-evolving field.

Start by mentioning the 3D modeling and animation software you are most familiar with. Give a brief overview of your experience using these tools, such as how long you have been working with them and what projects you have completed with them. If you have any certifications or awards related to 3D modeling and animation, be sure to mention those as well. Finally, explain that you are always open to learning new software and technologies as needed.

Example: “I have extensive experience with 3D modeling and animation software, including Maya, Blender, and Cinema 4D. I am also certified in Adobe After Effects. In the past three years, I have created dozens of projects using these tools for both personal and professional clients. Additionally, I always stay up to date on new technologies and methods related to digital art and am more than willing to learn any new software if needed.”

6. Tell me about a time when you had to collaborate with other artists or designers to complete a project.

Digital artists often work on projects with other artists and designers, so it’s important to show that you know how to work with a team to get the job done. Interviewers will want to understand what your role was in the collaboration, how you handled any disagreements, and how you ultimately achieved the desired result.

Talk about a project that you worked on with other artists or designers and explain your role in the collaboration. Describe how you communicated with each other, what challenges you faced, and how you overcame them. Be sure to emphasize any successes you had as well as any lessons learned along the way. Show that you’re able to work effectively with others, even when there are disagreements, and that you understand the importance of collaboration for successful projects.

Example: “I recently worked on a project with two other digital artists to create an animated music video. We each had our own area of expertise, and we split up the work accordingly. For example, I was responsible for creating the backgrounds while one artist handled character design and another focused on animation. Whenever there were disagreements, we took time to talk through them and come to a consensus. In the end, we were able to complete the project ahead of schedule and it was well-received by both the client and audience. It was a great learning experience that showed me how important collaboration is in any creative process.”

7. What strategies do you use to ensure accuracy when working with complex designs?

Digital art is all about precision and accuracy, and this question is designed to make sure that you’re aware of the importance of attention to detail. Interviewers want to make sure that you understand the importance of accuracy and that you have strategies in place to ensure that your work is perfect every time.

Start by talking about how you use a variety of tools to check the accuracy of your work. For example, you can mention that you use software such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop for vector-based artwork, or 3D modeling programs like Maya or Blender for more complex designs. You can also talk about how you use other methods such as double-checking measurements, using grids and rulers, and comparing colors with color swatches. Finally, emphasize that accuracy is key in digital art and that you take it seriously.

Example: “I believe that accuracy is essential when creating digital art, so I use a variety of tools to ensure my work is precise every time. For vector-based artwork, I rely heavily on Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop for their precision tools, such as grids and rulers. For 3D models, I use Maya or Blender, depending on the project. I also double-check measurements and compare colors with color swatches before submitting any final designs. Attention to detail is extremely important in digital art, and I take great pride in ensuring that all of my work meets the highest standards of accuracy.”

8. How do you handle feedback from clients or colleagues?

Working with digital art is a collaborative process. You’ll have to take feedback from clients and colleagues and merge it with your own creative vision to create the best product. Your interviewer wants to know you can handle this responsibility and be flexible when it comes to feedback. They need to trust that you can work well with others and understand the importance of feedback in the creative process.

Here, you want to emphasize your ability to take feedback and use it to create the best product. Talk about how you’ve handled situations in the past where clients or colleagues have given you feedback that was different than what you had originally planned. Explain how you were able to incorporate their input while still staying true to your own vision. Show that you can be flexible but also ensure that the final outcome is something everyone can be proud of.

Example: “I’ve found that feedback is an essential part of the creative process. I always take it seriously and respect the opinion of my clients and colleagues. I listen carefully to what they have to say and try to understand their perspective. I then take that feedback and use it to refine my work and ensure that it meets the needs of both the client and the project. I always strive to find a balance between meeting the expectations of the client and staying true to my own creative vision.”

9. Do you have any experience with motion graphics or video editing?

Motion graphics, video editing, and other related digital art skills are in high demand, so it’s important for potential employers to know if you have any experience in these areas. This question is a great opportunity for you to showcase any skills you have in this area, and to explain how they can help the company you’re interviewing for.

Be prepared to discuss any experience you have with motion graphics, video editing, or other related digital art skills. Talk about the projects you’ve worked on in the past and how your experience has helped you develop these skills. If you don’t have much experience in this area, explain what steps you would take to learn more and how you plan to stay up-to-date with the latest trends in motion graphics and video editing.

Example: “I have experience with motion graphics and video editing, and I’m passionate about staying up-to-date with the latest trends. I’ve created motion graphics for a variety of projects, from promotional videos to educational content. I’m also familiar with video editing software such as Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, and I’m always looking for new ways to improve my skills. I’m confident that my experience and understanding of motion graphics and video editing can help me excel in this role.”

10. Describe your process for developing concepts and ideas into finished pieces of artwork.

Digital art is a highly creative field, and the interviewer wants to get a sense of your creative process. They want to know how you come up with ideas, what techniques or methods you use to develop those ideas, and how you turn them into final pieces of artwork. This question will give them insight into your creative process and help them evaluate your ability to create quality work.

You should be prepared to walk the interviewer through your creative process, from brainstorming and idea generation to concept development and execution. Talk about any tools or techniques you use to develop ideas, such as research, sketching, or experimentation with different media. Explain how you turn an idea into a finished piece of artwork, including the steps you take and the decisions you make along the way. Be sure to emphasize your creativity and ability to produce high-quality work.

Example: “When I’m starting a new project, I first do some research to get a better understanding of the subject matter. I like to experiment with different media and techniques to explore different possibilities. I then pick the one that I think will work best for the project. After I have an idea in mind, I create a rough sketch to get a better visual idea of the artwork. Once I’m happy with the sketch, I refine it, making necessary adjustments and adding details. Once I’m satisfied with the artwork, I use digital tools to make any final adjustments and to create a finished piece.”

11. What techniques do you use to create realistic textures and lighting effects?

The interviewer wants to know if you have the technical skills necessary to create the type of artwork they’re looking for. Digital art is a highly skilled profession, and you’ll need to be able to demonstrate the techniques you use to create the desired effects. This question will help the interviewer understand your level of expertise and design aesthetic.

Before the interview, you should review your portfolio and be prepared to discuss specific techniques that you used to create certain pieces. If you’re new to digital art, then talk about the techniques you’ve learned in school or through online tutorials. You can also speak to how you use different software tools to achieve realistic textures and lighting effects. Be sure to explain why you chose a particular technique for a project and what results it produced.

Example: “I use a variety of techniques to create realistic textures and lighting effects, depending on the project. For example, for a recent piece I created for a client, I used a combination of Adobe Photoshop and Zbrush to create realistic textures. I also used 3D software to create a more dynamic lighting effect. I’m constantly experimenting with new software and techniques to stay up-to-date with the latest trends in digital art. I’m confident that my skills and experience make me an ideal candidate for this role.”

12. How do you approach creating artwork for different platforms (e.g. web, print, mobile)?

Digital art is a versatile field that requires a deep understanding of the various platforms it can be used on. From designing websites to creating artwork for mobile apps and video games, each platform has its own unique requirements and challenges. An interviewer wants to know that you understand the differences between them and can approach each one with the required knowledge and skill.

Talk about your experience creating artwork for different platforms, and discuss the specific steps you take to ensure that the artwork is optimized for each platform. For example, if you’re designing a website, you might talk about how you use color theory and responsive design principles to create an attractive and functional user interface. If you’re creating artwork for a mobile app, you could discuss how you focus on usability and visual clarity when designing icons and buttons. Finally, be sure to mention any specialized software or tools you’re familiar with that can help you create high-quality artwork.

Example: “No matter what platform I’m creating artwork for, I always start with a clear understanding of the project goals and the desired user experience. For web design, I use color theory and responsive design principles to create attractive and functional user interfaces. For mobile apps, I focus on creating icons and buttons that are easy to use and visually clear. I’m also familiar with specialized software and tools like Adobe Creative Suite and Sketch for creating high-quality artwork. Additionally, I’m always staying up-to-date on the latest trends in digital art to ensure that my work is modern and relevant.”

13. What are some of the challenges you face when creating artwork for multiple devices?

Digital artwork can be displayed on a variety of devices, from phones to tablets to desktop computers. Each device will have its own unique display size, resolution, and aspect ratio. The interviewer wants to know if you’re familiar with the challenges of creating artwork for multiple devices and whether you have a strategy for dealing with those challenges.

To answer this question, you should explain the steps you take to ensure your artwork looks great on all devices. You can talk about how you use responsive design principles to create artwork that scales properly across different screen sizes and resolutions. You can also discuss how you test your designs on multiple devices to make sure they look as intended. Finally, you can mention any tools or software you use to simplify the process of creating artwork for multiple devices.

Example: “I’m very familiar with the challenges of creating artwork for multiple devices. To ensure my artwork looks great on all devices, I use responsive design principles to create artwork that scales properly across different screen sizes and resolutions. I also test my designs on multiple devices to make sure they look as intended. To simplify the process, I use software like Adobe XD and Sketch to create artwork that can be easily adapted for different devices.”

14. How do you manage deadlines and prioritize tasks when working on multiple projects at once?

Digital artists often have multiple projects going at once and must manage time efficiently to ensure that deadlines are met. This question is designed to gauge your ability to multitask and prioritize tasks in order to get the job done. Additionally, it highlights your ability to manage stress and handle pressure in a fast-paced professional environment.

Talk about your experience with multitasking and how you prioritize tasks. You can discuss strategies that have worked for you in the past, such as breaking down projects into smaller tasks and setting deadlines for each one or creating a timeline to keep track of all tasks. Additionally, emphasize any tools or methods you use to stay organized and on top of deadlines. Finally, explain how you manage stress when working on multiple projects at once.

Example: “I have a lot of experience with multitasking and managing multiple projects at once. I always make sure that I break down projects into smaller tasks and set deadlines for each one. This helps me prioritize tasks and stay organized. Additionally, I use project management tools to keep track of all the tasks and deadlines. I also make sure to take regular breaks and stay focused on one task at a time. This helps me manage stress and ensure that I meet all deadlines on time.”

15. What strategies do you use to make sure your artwork looks consistent across all platforms?

Digital art is a fast-paced world and one that’s constantly changing. You need to be able to keep up with the latest trends and make sure your artwork is looking its best on whatever platform it’s being displayed on. Interviewers want to know that you’re aware of the importance of consistency and have the strategies in place to make sure your artwork looks the same no matter where it’s seen.

To answer this question, you’ll want to focus on the strategies and tools you use to ensure consistency across platforms. Talk about how you test your artwork on different devices and browsers to make sure it looks good no matter where it’s seen. You can also mention any software or plugins you use to help with color management, scaling, or other tasks related to ensuring a consistent look. Finally, don’t forget to talk about how you stay up-to-date on the latest trends in digital art so that you can keep your work looking fresh.

Example: “To make sure my artwork looks consistent across all platforms, I use a combination of tools and strategies. I always begin by testing my artwork on different devices and browsers to make sure it looks good no matter where it’s seen. I also use color management software to ensure that my artwork looks the same across different screens. Additionally, I use plugins to help with scaling and other tasks related to maintaining a consistent look. Finally, I stay up-to-date on the latest trends in digital art so that my work is always fresh and relevant.”

16. Have you ever created artwork for virtual reality applications?

Digital art is a rapidly growing area, and virtual reality (VR) is one of the most cutting-edge and exciting applications of digital art. Knowing how to work with 3D modeling and virtual environments is becoming increasingly important for digital artists, since many companies are now asking for work specifically tailored to VR applications. This question can help an interviewer understand your level of experience in this area and gauge how quickly you can learn new skills.

The best way to answer this question is to be honest about your experience. If you have not created artwork for VR applications, explain any related experiences you have had that could help you in this area, such as 3D modeling or working with other virtual environments. If you are just starting out, let the interviewer know that you are eager to learn and excited by the prospect of creating art specifically tailored to VR applications.

Example: “I have not yet had the opportunity to create artwork specifically for VR applications, but I am very interested in doing so. I have a lot of experience with 3D modeling and working in virtual environments, and I am confident that I could quickly learn the skills necessary to create artwork for VR applications. I am also excited by the prospect of creating something that could be experienced in a virtual reality, and I am eager to learn more about this field.”

17. What methods do you use to optimize artwork for faster loading times?

Digital artists are often tasked with creating high-quality artwork that can be used across different platforms, such as websites and mobile applications. Optimizing artwork for faster loading times is a critical skill for digital artists to have in order to ensure that their work is accessible to a wide audience. An interviewer may ask this question to assess your technical skills and knowledge of the optimization process.

To answer this question, you should be prepared to discuss the techniques and tools that you use to optimize artwork. For example, you might mention using compression techniques such as JPEG or PNG, reducing file sizes without affecting image quality, or using vector graphics instead of raster images. Additionally, you can talk about your experience with specific software programs like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. Finally, you could also mention any strategies you have for testing and validating optimized artwork.

Example: “I understand the importance of optimizing artwork for faster loading times, and I have experience using a variety of techniques and tools to do this. For example, I often use compression techniques such as JPEG and PNG to reduce file sizes without sacrificing image quality. I’m also familiar with vector graphics and their advantages for creating optimized artwork. I also use Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to optimize artwork, and I have experience testing and validating optimized artwork to make sure it looks good and loads quickly.”

18. How do you handle copyright issues when using stock images or other resources?

Copyright is an important aspect of digital art. Knowing how to navigate copyright issues when it comes to using stock images or other resources can be a valuable asset for an employer. This question helps the interviewer gauge your understanding of copyright law and how you handle issues related to it.

You should be prepared to answer this question by discussing how you research copyright laws and the steps you take to ensure that your work is not infringing on any copyrights. You can also discuss any methods you use to make sure that the images or resources you are using are properly credited. Additionally, you can talk about how you stay up-to-date with changes in copyright law and how you adjust your work accordingly.

Example: “I take copyright issues very seriously when it comes to my work. I always make sure that I research copyright laws and regulations before using any stock images or resources. I also make sure that I credit the source of any images or resources I use in my work. Additionally, I stay up-to-date with changes in copyright law and adjust my work accordingly. I also take extra steps to ensure that I am not infringing upon any copyrights, such as contacting the original creators or publishers of the images or resources to seek permission to use them.”

19. What would you do if a client asked you to create artwork outside of your usual style?

Digital artists are often asked to create artwork outside of their usual style. This question gives the interviewer a chance to see how flexible you are in terms of your creative process and artistic vision. It also allows them to assess your ability to adjust to different types of requests and work within various parameters.

You should be honest and open about your ability to work outside of your usual style. Talk about how you would approach the project by discussing any research or experimentation you might do, as well as potential solutions that could meet the client’s needs while still staying true to your own artistic vision. Showing that you are flexible and willing to try new things is key here.

Example: “I understand the importance of being able to adapt to different types of requests. I would approach this project by doing research into the client’s desired style and gaining an understanding of the elements they’re looking for. Then I would work to find a way to incorporate those elements into my own style. I’m comfortable experimenting with new techniques and would be open to suggestions from the client while still staying true to my own artistic vision. I’m confident that I could create artwork that meets the client’s needs while still staying true to my own creative process.”

20. Describe a time when you had to troubleshoot an issue with a piece of software or hardware.

Digital artists rely on a variety of tools—from hardware like graphic tablets and monitors to software like Photoshop and InDesign—to create their work. Interviewers want to know you understand how to troubleshoot problems that may arise with these programs, as well as how to find solutions to any issues you come across. This is important for any digital artist, as it will help ensure that the work is completed on time and to a high standard.

To answer this question, start by describing the issue you faced. Then explain the steps you took to troubleshoot and resolve it. Be sure to include any research or help from colleagues that you may have used to find a solution. Finally, discuss the outcome of your efforts—did you solve the problem? If not, what other solutions did you come up with?

Example: “Recently, I was working on a project in Photoshop and encountered an issue with the layers panel not displaying correctly. I troubleshot the issue by researching online for possible solutions, as well as asking colleagues for advice. I ended up finding a solution that involved resetting the preferences for the program, which resolved the issue. I also took the time to document the steps I took to troubleshoot the issue, so that I could refer back to them in the future if needed.”

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30 Digital Art Quiz Questions and Answers

Digital art is a form of artistic expression that utilizes digital technology as the primary medium for creating and manipulating visual artwork. Unlike traditional art forms that involve physical materials such as canvas, paint, and brushes, digital art is created and displayed using electronic devices like computers, tablets, and graphic drawing tablets. It encompasses a wide range of styles and techniques, from digital painting and illustration to 3D modeling and animation.

Overview of Digital Art:

Digital Drawing and Painting: Artists use specialized software and digital drawing tools to create digital artwork that resembles traditional drawing and painting techniques. This allows for precise control over brush strokes, color blending, and layering.

Vector Art: Vector graphics are composed of mathematical paths and shapes, enabling artists to create scalable and resolution-independent images. This makes vector art ideal for designing logos, icons, and illustrations that need to be resized without losing quality.

Photo Manipulation: Digital artists can use image editing software to manipulate and enhance photographs, adding creative effects and merging multiple images to create composite artwork.

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3D Modeling and Sculpting: Digital artists can create three-dimensional objects and characters using 3D modeling and sculpting software. These models can be further textured and animated to bring them to life.

Animation: Digital art allows artists to create animated sequences and movies using specialized animation software. This includes both 2D and 3D animation techniques.

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Part 1: 30 digital art quiz questions & answers.

1. What is digital art? a) Art created using only traditional materials b) Art created with the help of computer technology c) Art that includes both digital and physical elements d) Art that depicts futuristic concepts Answer: b) Art created with the help of computer technology

2. Which of the following is a characteristic of digital art? a) Physical texture b) Traditional canvas c) Pixel-based images d) Oil-based paints Answer: c) Pixel-based images

3. Which digital art technique allows artists to create resolution-independent graphics? a) Digital painting b) Photo manipulation c) Vector art d) Animation Answer: c) Vector art

4. What is the advantage of using layers in digital art software? a) Layers allow artists to apply physical texture to the artwork. b) Layers prevent the need for saving files. c) Layers enable non-destructive editing. d) Layers make the artwork look three-dimensional. Answer: c) Layers enable non-destructive editing.

5. Which digital art tool provides pressure sensitivity, simulating traditional art techniques? a) Eraser Tool b) Paint Bucket Tool c) Lasso Tool d) Stylus Pen Answer: d) Stylus Pen

6. Which digital art style aims to create a sense of movement through successive images? a) Surrealism b) Realism c) Impressionism d) Animation Answer: d) Animation

7. Digital art can be easily shared and distributed online through: a) Canvas exhibitions b) Physical galleries c) Art museums d) Websites and social media platforms Answer: d) Websites and social media platforms

8. Which software is widely used for digital painting and illustration? a) Adobe Photoshop b) Microsoft Word c) Autodesk Maya d) Adobe Illustrator Answer: a) Adobe Photoshop

9. What makes digital art more accessible for artists compared to traditional art forms? a) Traditional art is more popular. b) Digital art is cheaper to produce. c) Digital art can be replicated without degradation. d) Traditional art requires less skill and training. Answer: c) Digital art can be replicated without degradation.

10. What is the purpose of the “Layers” panel in digital art software? a) To adjust color balance b) To organize and manage elements in the artwork c) To create vector illustrations d) To apply 3D effects to the artwork Answer: b) To organize and manage elements in the artwork

11. Which of the following is an example of digital art software used for 3D modeling and animation? a) Adobe Photoshop b) Autodesk Maya c) Corel Painter d) GIMP Answer: b) Autodesk Maya

12. Digital art allows artists to create scalable and resolution-independent images using: a) Raster graphics b) Vector graphics c) Pencil sketches d) Oil paintings Answer: b) Vector graphics

13. How can digital art be used in the entertainment industry? a) To create traditional artworks for galleries b) To design book covers and posters c) To sculpt physical statues d) To produce animated movies and video games Answer: d) To produce animated movies and video games

14. Which digital art technique involves merging multiple images to create a composite artwork? a) Digital painting b) Vector art c) 3D modeling d) Photo manipulation Answer: d) Photo manipulation

15. What is the advantage of using digital art in educational settings? a) It is more expensive than traditional art materials. b) It requires specialized training and skills. c) It allows for easy corrections and modifications. d) It limits creativity and artistic expression. Answer: c) It allows for easy corrections and modifications.

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16. What is the primary tool used in digital art to create smooth curves and shapes? a) Eraser Tool b) Brush Tool c) Pen Tool d) Lasso Tool Answer: c) Pen Tool

17. Which digital art style aims to depict dream-like and imaginative scenes? a) Surrealism b) Realism c) Cubism d) Pointillism Answer: a) Surrealism

18. Which digital art software is commonly used for creating vector graphics and illustrations? a) Adobe Illustrator b) Autodesk SketchBook c) Corel Painter d) Adobe Premiere Pro Answer: a) Adobe Illustrator

19. How does digital art benefit artists in terms of experimentation and creativity? a) It restricts artists to traditional art techniques only. b) It limits the number of layers in the artwork. c) It allows artists to undo and redo actions easily. d) It is a costly and time-consuming process. Answer: c) It allows artists to undo and redo actions easily.

20. What is the primary advantage of using digital art for animation? a) It requires less skill and training. b) It allows for easy sharing and distribution online. c) It is more expensive than traditional animation techniques. d) It enables artists to create smoother and more fluid animations. Answer: d) It enables artists to create smoother and more fluid animations.

21. Which of the following is an example of digital art being used in the gaming industry? a) Sculpting physical statues for game characters b) Creating digital illustrations for promotional materials c) Producing concept art for characters and environments d) Designing book covers for game manuals Answer: c) Producing concept art for characters and environments

22. What distinguishes vector art from raster art in digital art? a) Vector art is more realistic than raster art. b) Vector art uses pixels, while raster art uses mathematical equations. c) Vector art can be resized without loss of quality, while raster art cannot. d) Vector art is monochromatic, while raster art is colorful. Answer: c) Vector art can be resized without loss of quality, while raster art cannot.

23. What is the purpose of using pressure sensitivity in digital art? a) To control the brightness of the colors b) To add texture to the artwork c) To adjust the thickness and opacity of brush strokes d) To create 3D effects in the artwork Answer: c) To adjust the thickness and opacity of brush strokes

24. How does digital art facilitate collaboration between artists? a) It restricts collaboration to artists working in the same physical location. b) It allows artists to work on the same project simultaneously and share files easily. c) It limits the number of layers in the artwork, making it challenging to share files. d) It is more expensive and time-consuming than traditional art collaboration. Answer: b) It allows artists to work on the same project simultaneously and share files easily.

25. Digital art has an advantage in archiving and preservation because: a) It requires regular maintenance and repairs. b) It is more vulnerable to physical damage and decay. c) It can be easily stored and replicated without degradation. d) It limits artistic expression and creativity. Answer: c) It can be easily stored and replicated without degradation.

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26. Which software is commonly used for digital sculpting and creating 3D models in the film and gaming industries? a) Adobe Illustrator b) Autodesk Maya c) Corel Painter d) Adobe Photoshop Answer: b) Autodesk Maya

27. How can digital art be used in advertising and marketing? a) To create traditional paintings for billboards b) To design logos and branding materials c) To produce hand-drawn illustrations for print ads d) To create physical sculptures for promotional events Answer: b) To design logos and branding materials

28. Which digital art style emphasizes the use of small, distinct dots of color to create images? a) Surrealism b) Pointillism c) Realism d) Abstract Expressionism Answer: b) Pointillism

29. How does digital art benefit artists in terms of experimentation and creativity? a) It restricts artists to traditional art techniques only. b) It limits the number of layers in the artwork. c) It allows artists to undo and redo actions easily. d) It is a costly and time-consuming process. Answer: c) It allows artists to undo and redo actions easily.

30. Which of the following is an example of digital art being used in the fashion industry? a) Creating traditional sketches for fashion designs b) Sculpting physical fashion accessories c) Designing digital patterns for fabrics d) Painting canvas prints for runway shows Answer: c) Designing digital patterns for fabrics

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Digital Art

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What is Animation?

A Drawing that moves

the creation of moving pictures in a two-dimensional environment

A simulation of movement or the perception of motion created by the rapid display of a series of still images

A cartoon that has Movement

Which animation below is a 2D animation?

Which animation below is a 3D animation?

What does CGI stand for?

A Flip Book is....

Not an animation

An animation

What is FPS and what does it stand for?

What is Stop-Motion Animation?

What is digital art?

Art on a computer

Art using a drawing tablet

The art or process of making movies with drawings, computer graphics, or photographs of static objects, including all techniques other than the continuous filming of live-action images

A practice that uses digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process

What is layering in digital art?

Transparent sheet to give drawing depth

The line work of a drawing

Different sheets if "paper" that seperate the foreground and background

It Helps adjusting composition easier

Which art below is a digital painting?

Which painting below is not digital?

Which app below is used for animation?

What is masking in digital art?

Hiding an area from being edited/ painted

Painting over a large area

Painting a character onto a background

Deleting an area of the painting

What does RGB stand for in digital art?

What is RGB in digital art?

What art form do you like best?

Digital art

What is my favorite art supply to use? (And the specific brand).

What is unsharp mask in digital art?

What are the 3 basic categories of digital art?

Which of the following is digital art?

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When AI can make art – what does it mean for creativity?

Image-generators such as Dall-E 2 can produce pictures on any theme you wish for in seconds. Some creatives are alarmed but others are sceptical of the hype

W hen the concept artist and illustrator RJ Palmer first witnessed the fine-tuned photorealism of compositions produced by the AI image generator Dall-E 2, his feeling was one of unease. The tool, released by the AI research company OpenAI, showed a marked improvement on 2021’s Dall-E, and was quickly followed by rivals such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. Type in any surreal prompt, from Kermit the frog in the style of Edvard Munch , to Gollum from The Lord of the Rings feasting on a slice of watermelon, and these tools will return a startlingly accurate depiction moments later.

The internet revelled in the meme-making opportunities, with a Twitter account documenting “weird Dall-E generations” racking up more than a million followers. Cosmopolitan trumpeted the world’s first AI-generated magazine cover , and technology investors fell over themselves to wave in the new era of “generative AI”. The image-generation capabilities have already spread to video, with the release of Google’s Imagen Video and Meta’s Make-A-Video.

But AI’s new artistic prowess wasn’t received so ecstatically by some creatives. “The main concern for me is what this does to the future of not just my industry, but creative human industries in general,” says Palmer.

By ingesting large datasets in order to analyse patterns and build predictive models, AI has long proved itself superior to humans at some tasks. It’s this number-crunching nous that led an AI to trounce the world Go champion back in 2016 , rapidly computing the most advantageous game strategy, and unafraid to execute moves that would have elicited scoffs had they come from a person. But until recently, producing original output, especially creative work, was considered a distinctly human pursuit.

Recent improvements in AI have shifted the dial. Not only can AI image generators now transpose written phrases into novel pictures, but strides have been made in AI speech-generation too: large language models such as GPT-3 have reached a level of fluency that convinced at least one recently fired Google researcher of machine sentience. Plug in Bach’s oeuvre, and an AI can improvise music in more or less the same style – with the caveat that it would often be impossible for a human orchestra to actually play.

This class of technology is known as generative AI, and it works through a process known as diffusion. Essentially, huge datasets are scraped together to train the AI, and through a technical process the AI is able to devise new content that resembles the training data but isn’t identical. Once it has seen millions of pictures of dogs tagged with the word “dog”, it is able to lay down pixels in the shape of an entirely novel pup that resembles the dataset closely enough that we would have no issue labelling it a dog. It’s not perfect – AI image tools still struggle with rendering hands that look human, body proportions can be off, and they have a habit of producing nonsense writing.

While internet users have embraced this supercharged creative potential – armed with the correctly refined prompt, even novices can now create arresting digital canvases – some artists have balked at the new technology’s capacity for mimicry. Among the prompts entered into image generators Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, many tag an artist’s name in order to ensure a more aesthetically pleasing style for the resulting image. Something as mundane as a bowl of oranges can become eye-catching if rendered in the style of, say, Picasso. Because the AI has been trained on billions of images, some of which are copyrighted works by living artists, it can generally create a pretty faithful approximation.

Some are outraged at what they consider theft of their artistic trademark. Greg Rutkowski, a concept artist and illustrator well known for his golden-light infused epic fantasy scenes, has already been mentioned in hundreds of thousands of prompts used across Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. “It’s been just a month. What about in a year? I probably won’t be able to find my work out there because [the internet] will be flooded with AI art,” Rutkowski told MIT Technology Review . “That’s concerning.”

Dall-E 2 is a black box, with OpenAI refusing to release the code or share the data that the tools were trained on. But Stable Diffusion has chosen to open source its code and share details of the database of images used to train its model.

Spawning, an artist collective, has built a tool called Have I Been Trained? to help artists discover if their artworks were among the 5.8bn images used to train Stable Diffusion, and to opt in or out of appearing in future training sets. The company behind Stable Diffusion, Stability AI, has said it is open to working with the tool. Of the 1,800 artists that have signed up to use the tool already, Matthew Dryhurst, an academic and member of Spawning says it’s a 60/40 split in favour of opt-out.

But the Concept Art Association (CAA) stresses that the damage has already been done this time around, because the tools have already been trained on artists’ work without their consent. “It’s like someone who already robbed you saying, ‘Do you want to opt out of me robbing you?’” says Karla Ortiz, an illustrator, and board member of CAA.

Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque says that although the data used to train Stable Diffusion didn’t offer an opt-out option, it “was very much a test model, heavily unoptimised on a snapshot of images on the internet.” He says new models are typically trained on fresh datasets and this is when the company would take artists’ requests into consideration.

It’s not just artworks: analysis of the training database for Stable Diffusion has revealed it also sucked up private medical photography , photos of members of the public (sometimes alongside their full names), and pornography.

Ortiz particularly objects to Stability AI commercialising part of its operation – DreamStudio, which offers customers custom models and enhanced ease of use. “These companies have now set a precedent that you use everyone’s copyrighted and private data without anyone even opting in,” she says. “Then they say: ‘We can’t do anything about it, the genie’s out of the bottle!’”

What can be done about this beyond relying on the beneficence of the companies behind these tools is still in question.

The CAA cites worrying UK legislation that might allow AI companies even greater freedom to suck up copyrighted creative works to train tools that can then be deployed commercially. In the US, the organisation has met government officials to speak about copyright law, and is currently in talks with Washington lobbyists to discuss how to push back on this as an industry.

Beyond copycatting, there’s the even bigger issue pinpointed by Palmer: do these tools put an entire class of creatives at risk? In some cases, AI may be used in place of stock images – the image library Shutterstock recently made a deal with OpenAI to integrate Dall-E into its product. But Palmer argues that artwork such as illustration for articles, books or album covers may soon face competition from AI, undermining a thriving area of commercial art.

The owners of AI image generators tend to argue that on the contrary, these tools democratise art. “So much of the world is creatively constipated,” the founder of Stability AI, Emad Mostaque, said at a recent event to celebrate a $101m fundraising round, “and we’re going to make it so that they can poop rainbows.” But if everyone can harness AI to create technically masterful images, what does it say about the essence of creativity?

Anna Ridler , an artist known for her work with AI, says that despite Dall-E 2 feeling “like magic” the first time you use it, so far she hasn’t felt a spark of inspiration in her experiments with the tool. She prefers working with another kind of AI called generative adversarial networks (GANs). GANs work as an exchange between two networks, one creating new imagery, and the other deciding how well the image meets a specified goal. An artistic GAN might have the goal of creating something that is as different as possible from its training data without leaving the category of what humans would consider visual art.

These issues have intensified debate around the extent to which we can credit AI with creativity. According to Marcus du Sautoy , an Oxford University mathematician and author of The Creativity Code: How AI is Learning to Write, Paint and Think , Dall-E and other image generators probably come closest to replicating a kind of “combinational” creativity, because the algorithms are taught to create novel images in the same style as millions of others in the training data. GANs of the kind Ridler works with are closer to “transformational” creativity, he says – creating something in an entirely novel style.

Ridler objects to such a formulaic approach to defining creativity. “It flattens it down into thinking of art as interesting wallpaper, rather than something that is trying to express ideas and search for truth,” she says. As a conceptual artist, she is well aware of AI’s shortcomings. “AI can’t handle concepts: collapsing moments in time, memory, thoughts, emotions – all of that is a real human skill, that makes a piece of art rather than something that visually looks pretty.”

AI image tools demonstrate some of these deficiencies. While “astronaut riding a horse” will return an accurate rendering, “horse riding an astronaut” will return images that look much the same – indicating that AI doesn’t really grasp the causal relationships between different actors in the world.

Dryhurst and Ridler contend the “artist replacement” idea stems from underestimating the artistic process. Dryhurst laments what he sees as the media whipping up alarmist narratives, highlighting a recent New York Times article about an artist who used Midjourney to win the digital category of the Colorado state fair’s annual art competition. Dryhurst points out that a state fair is not exactly a prestigious forum. “They were giving out prizes for canned fruit,” he says. “What annoys me is that there seems to be this kind of thirst to scare artists.”

“Art is dead, dude,” said the state fair winner.

It is possible that the hype around these tools as disruptive forces outstrips reality. Mostaque says AI image generators are part of what he calls “intelligent media”, which represents a “one trillion dollar” opportunity, citing Disney’s content budget of more than $10bn (£8.7bn), and the entire games industry’s value of more than $170bn. “Every single piece of content from the BBC to Disney will be made interactive by these models,” he says.

Emerging applications right now are more prosaic including moodboards for design consulting, storyboards for films, and mock-ups for interior design, and Mark Beccue, an analyst at Omdia’s AI division, is sceptical about the $1tn figure. “What are the killer use cases here?” he says. “It doesn’t make sense. What problem are you solving with this?” An analyst from consulting firm Accenture says the tools could one day be used to create content to train machine learning algorithms, such as in self-driving vehicles, and speed up games creation. Whether it will amount to anything as lucrative as AI image generators and their backers propose remains to be seen.

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Highlights from Day 3 of Trump’s hush money trial

What to know about trump's hush money trial.

• Former President Donald Trump's hush money trial resumes in New York City for the third day today with jury selection. Twelve jurors have been seated so far, with new additions today including a man who works in investment banking and a security engineer.
• Tuesday's proceedings in state Judge Juan Merchan's courtroom were marked by fiery exchanges over Trump's behavior and old Facebook posts of prospective jurors.
• Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records related to a $130,000 payment made to adult film actor Stormy Daniels at the end of the 2016 election cycle to keep her quiet about her allegation that she and Trump had a sexual encounter. Trump has denied the affair.
• Catch up with what you missed on Day 2 .

Trump returns to Trump Tower

Megan Lebowitz

The former president's motorcade has returned to Trump Tower after the third day of the hush money trial.

Meet the 12 jurors at Trump’s hush money trial

Rebecca Shabad is in Washington, D.C.

All 12 jurors, plus an alternate, were selected this week to serve on the jury after they made it clear to both sides that they could render a fair and impartial verdict.

Prosecutors and the defense team whittled down a pool of nearly 200 people to 12 jurors and an alternate after having grilled them about their personal histories, political views, social media posts and ability to remain impartial despite any opinions they might have about the polarizing former president.

Here's a brief description of each juror.

Read the full story here.

Trump attorney asks who the DA plans to call as first 3 witnesses

Zoë Richards

Trump attorney Todd Blanche asked whom the district attorney's office plans to call as its first three witnesses. Joshua Steinglass of the DA’s office refused on the basis that Trump has been tweeting about them.

Judge Merchan said he does not fault the DA’s office for its position. Blanche said Trump will not tweet about the witnesses, which Merchan said Blanche cannot promise, and he told him to treat the information as “attorneys’ eyes only.”

Merchan declined to order the DA’s office to name its first three witnesses, and Steinglass did not otherwise agree to do so.

Trump continues criticizing the case after court proceedings end for the day

Trump addressed reporters after court was dismissed for the day. He said that he was supposed to be in states like Georgia, New Hampshire and North Carolina to campaign but that instead "I've been here all day" for an "unfair trial."

Trump held up a stack of news stories and editorials that he said were critical of the case. He continued railing against the trial. "The whole thing is a mess," he said.

Trump did not respond to shouted questions from reporters.

Judge gives instructions to newly sworn-in jurors

Matt Johnson

Judge Merchan gave instructions to the jurors who were sworn in minutes ago. Among them: Do not discuss the case.

The jurors were then escorted out of the courtroom and walked past the defense table, from which Trump stared at them.

Court ends for the day. Dismissal on Monday and Tuesday will be 2 p.m.

Gary Grumbach

The court has decided that 2 p.m. will be the trial end time next Monday and Tuesday.

Here's the gender breakdown of the 12-person jury

Ginger Gibson Senior Washington Editor

The jury is seven men and five women.

Jurors are sworn in

The jurors selected today to sit on the panel were sworn in, vowing to hear the case in a "fair and impartial manner."

Trump watched as they raised their right hands for the swearing-in.

Jury selection will continue tomorrow for the six alternates.

Twelve jurors have been selected

The court has now seated 12 jurors.

“We have our jury,” Judge Merchan said when the 12th juror was picked.

The next six jurors selected will serve as alternates.

“I’m hopeful we will finish tomorrow,” the judge added.

Potential juror says she was a Bernie Sanders supporter when posting critically about Trump

A potential juror has been brought back into the courtroom for questions about her social media posts.

As she read one of her posts to the court, she said she was a Bernie Sanders supporter at the time.

“I was in a disturbed frame of mind during that election cycle," she said, adding that she no longer holds the positions expressed in the post.

Two more jurors seated, bringing the total to seven

Two new jurors have been seated, bringing the total seated back to seven after two were dismissed earlier.

The jurors are a man who works in investment banking and a man who is a security engineer.

Trump attorney questions juror's social media posts about former president

Alexandra Marquez is based in Washington, D.C.

Susan Necheles, a Trump attorney, is challenging Juror No. 430 for cause.

She alleges that the juror's posts through 2020 were vitriolic and that the juror called Trump a “racist, sexist narcissist” on social media.

Necheles also said the juror said, “Trump is an anathema to everything I was taught about Jesus … and could not be more fundamentally un-Christian.”

Defense lawyer cites book of journalist who is in the courtroom

Trump lawyer Susan Necheles referred to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman's book "Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America."

Haberman, who is covering the trial, is in the courtroom as part of the small pool of journalists allowed inside to share information about the jury selection process.

Prospective juror says it was pretty difficult not to have strong feelings about Trump during his presidency

One potential juror said it was pretty difficult not to have strong feelings or conversations about Trump during his presidency.

"There’s so much information about him everywhere. So no matter how you feel, you’re seeing things online," she said. "I mean he was our president, everyone knows who he is.”

One juror says they're a centrist and 'everybody needs a chance'

Jillian Frankel

One juror who was just questioned during voir dire told Necheles that they are a "centrist."

The juror added, "Everybody needs a chance, regardless of who they are, to be innocent until proven guilty.”

Court takes brief break to discuss strikes

The court has taken a brief break to discuss which jurors each side would like to strike.

Both the prosecution and defense have four remaining preemptory strikes. Both sides could each request that jurors be struck for cause.

Potential juror shares encounter with Trump and ex-wife 'shopping for baby things'

One prospective juror, who says they were born and raised in Brooklyn, described encountering Trump and his ex-wife Marla Maples once while they were "shopping for baby things" at ABC Home, an iconic Manhattan home goods store known for quirky, upscale decor.

Trump and Maples were married in the 1990s and share one daughter, Tiffany Trump.

Prospective juror says she doesn't have 'strong feelings' about Trump

One prospective juror told Trump's lawyer, "His politics aren't always my politics," but said she agrees with him on some policies and disagrees with him on others.

"But as a human being, that's a different topic," she said.

Asked about social media activity, she said, "Politics just seems like a nasty thing to be posting about during a national crisis."

She added, "I just don’t have strong feelings about President Trump at this point...I don’t post about him.”

One juror previously met Trump's lawyer

One of the jurors being questioned by Steinglass says she previously met one of Trump's attorneys.

Asked by Steinglass if this juror could remain impartial despite that, the juror said she had no concerns about her impartiality.

Prosecution refers to 'accomplice liability' to explain case theory

Laura Jarrett

For the second time in a week, the prosecution has used a notable example of “accomplice liability” in explaining their theory of the case to the prospective jurors.

Steinglass says that Mr. Trump is being held liable just like a husband who hires a hitman to kill his wife would be — even if the husband is in a different city when it happens, he’s still criminally liable.

One juror says she's concerned she knows too much about the case

One prospective jurors who said during the questionnaire that she had read Mark Pomerantz's book and was worried she knows too much about the case.

"I’m worried that I know too much," she said. “And academically, I know I have put it to the side. I’m worried that it’s going to seep in, in some way.”

Pomerantz is a former prosecutor who once oversaw the Manhattan District Attorney Office’s investigation into Trump.

Trump appears skeptical as voir dire begins

Trump watched skeptically as Steinglass asked the jurors whether any of them felt the district attorney would have to prove more because Trump is not like any other defendant.

Trump's body is not turned toward the jury or Steinglass, but his head is. Blanche and Bove are watching Steinglass and the jury more intently.

Trump then scribbled on a piece of paper and handed it to Bove, who shared it with Necheles. She then had a short exchange with Trump.

Judge Merchan says voir dire of prospective jurors will begin

The judge told the group of 18 prospective jurors that previously went through the questionnaire that they will now be questioned by both sides, with the prosecution up first.

Court back in session

Merchan is back on the bench and court is back in session. Attorneys for both sides will now question prospective jurors.

Spotted outside of the courthouse: former GOP Rep. George Santos

Former Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., was spotted outside of the courthouse. He did not answer a question from NBC News about what brought him here today.

Santos was ejected from Congress in December after he was federally charged with crimes like wire fraud and money laundering. He has pleaded not guilty. He is currently running for Congress in New York as an independent.

Court goes on a lunch break

The court has recessed for lunch until 2:15 p.m.

Juror dismissed after tying Trump to Berlusconi

One juror was just dismissed after disclosing that he was born and raised in Italy and then comparing Trump to Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister of Italy.

Berlusconi, who died last June, was an infamous womanizer and was convicted of tax fraud in 2013.

Potential juror says he's a few credits short of a college degree

One potential juror said that while he graduated from high school, he is a few credits short of a college degree, "which kills my parents."

A cold courtroom

Blanche, Trump's lawyer, just asked if they could make it warmer in the courtroom, saying, "it’s freezing" in the room.

Merchan agreed, "It’s chilly in here, no question."

Merchan excuses Juror No. 4

After they had a conference with the juror, Merchan announced he's excusing juror No. 4, who had previously been seated and sworn him. His prior arrest was questioned by the DA.

Seated juror 'expressed annoyance' about his personal information becoming public

A seated juror was called for questioning, with prosecutors inquiring about whether or not he was truthful in answering questions about his past criminal history.

Following a conference between the juror and Merchan, the judge said, the juror "expressed annoyance about how much information was out there about him in the public.”

And Merchan sealed the portion of the transcript where he says the juror discussed "highly personal" information.

Trump left the courtroom while decision on Juror 4 being made

Trump exited the courtroom at 11:45 a.m. He returned about eight minutes later.

One prospective juror works in law enforcement

One potential juror said that he has worked in law enforcement for 34 years and, in his spare time, he has season tickets to New York Rangers games and enjoys going to Yankees games.

Dismissed juror has "satirized Mr. Trump, often" online

Another dismissed juror, Mark, spoke to NBC News' Vaughn Hillyard outside the courthouse, telling him that he determined he couldn't be fair and impartial because, "I have satirized Mr. Trump, often, in my artwork."

Mark added, "There’s no way that Blanche — who’s not going to rely on the kindness of strangers — would permit me to be on the jury ... There’s no way that after my online presence ... that they would regard me to be fit to serve."

Mark's online comedy hadn't yet come up in the process when he raised his hand to signal he couldn't be fair and impartial, but he was sure Trump's lawyers would figure it out.

"It would be a waste of their time and, frankly, as a taxpayer, our money —for me to clog up the process," he added. 

Juror 4 has arrived

The person previously seated on the jury has come into the courtroom. He is going to be asked about crimes he or his wife are alleged to have committed, after they were unearthed by the DA's office.

Court takes a brief break

The court has taken a brief break.

One juror has read part of Michael Cohen's book

One of the jurors responding to questions said she has read several pages of "Disloyal," a book by Michael Cohen, Trump's former personal attorney, who is a potential witness in this case.

The juror said she read part of the book for unspecified "business reasons." Earlier in her questionnaire, the juror said she works in publishing, but it's unclear whether the book was directly related to her job.

Prospective juror says while he doesn't have strong beliefs aboutTrump, he does read The New York Times

A prospective juror who was just questioned said that while he doesn't have any strong opinions or firmly held beliefs about Trump, he does "read the news, New York Times and so forth."

The same person said he follows Trump's Truth Social posts, as well as Michael Cohen on X.

Potential jurors say they have read Trump's "The Art of the Deal"

One potential juror who said she subscribes to The New York Times, mainly for the crossword puzzle, said she read Trump's "The Art of the Deal" book decades ago.

The juror also said she has a relative who works for the Justice Department.

Another juror, who said he works in finance, also said he read "The Art of the Deal."

Questionnaire highlights tension points for potential jurors

The potential juror being questioned now by the judge encapsulates how tough it is for some working professionals called for jury duty in Manhattan to say they cannot be fair and impartial. This is a person who is a practicing attorney. 

She appears not to want to say publicly she can’t be fair, notwithstanding some deep sighs we can hear from her. She also clerked for a federal judge and discussed the case with him, so she’s treading carefully.

Dismissed juror: Trump "looked less orange" than I expected

One dismissed juror spoke to MSNBC's Yasmin Vossoughian outside the courthouse following her exit from the case.

"Everyone was shocked, everyone was frozen," said the woman, identified only by her first name, Kat. She recounted the moment she and fellow prospective jurors walked into the room and realized they'd been called for the Trump trial.

“We went into the courtroom and we saw Donald Trump ... I was shocked, I was sitting in the second row, like 6 feet away," she added.

Before showing up for jury duty, “I didn’t really [follow the case], I was too busy," Kat said, but added that she just became a U.S. citizen in August and realized, "I feel the duty, I’m a citizen and I have responsibilities.”

Asked about how Trump looked in the courtroom, Kat said, "He looked less orange" than she was expecting.

She added, “He doesn’t look angry or — I think he looks bored, like he wants this to finish.”

Potential juror said she discussed former Manhattan DA Mark Pomerantz's book with others

Summer Concepcion

The first potential juror said she had discussed the case at length with co-workers, including a book written by Mark Pomerantz , the former Manhattan district attorney who led the investigation into Trump’s alleged financial crimes . She said she hasn't read any of the books written by Michael Cohen or Trump.

The woman also disclosed that she attended the Women's March after Trump took office.

48 prospective jurors excused after signaling they can't be fair or impartial

After Judge Merchan told the pool of prospective jurors to raise their hand if they can't be fair and impartial, 48 out of 96 were excused.

Trump again closes his eyes while Merchan reads jury instructions aloud

Katherine Doyle

Trump again closed his eyes while Merchan read aloud jury instructions. He didn't open them when his lawyer Emil Bove passed a note to Blanche in front of him.

Merchan is soft-spoken and his voice has a relaxing tone. Trump is seen moving his head back and forth while his eyes remain closed.

Trump yawned as Merchan reached the end of the jury instruction.

Juror issues raise questions about trial timeline

The fact that we now have one juror dismissed already this morning and one potentially on the rocks (for apparently not being forthcoming on the questionnaire) shows the challenges in predicting when a final slate of 12 jurors will be empaneled. 

It also shows how waiting several more days before the opening statements runs the risk that more jurors will drop out as they sleep on the gravity of being involved in this case.

DA's office says Trump has violated judge's gag order seven more times

Prosecutor Chris Conroy handed up a new order in response to Trump's social media posts. The DA alleges that Trump has violated the judge's gag order seven more times and he wants the posts included in the hearing scheduled for Tuesday.

Yesterday, the former president complained about the jury selection process and Conroy said that "most disturbingly" Trump quoted a Fox News host suggesting that "undercover" liberal activists are lying to get onto the jury.

Conroy said the DA's office is still considering options in terms of sanctions prosecutors are seeking.

Merchan raises concerns about "the veracity of Juror #4’s answers"

After discussion about the gag order, Merchan said he had concerns about one of the jurors and how truthfully the person had answered questions.

One of the questions on the juror questionnaire asks if the juror or any of their family members were accused of a crime.

Joshua Steinglass of the DA's office told Merchan that they discovered an article featuring a person with the same name who was arrested in Westchester in the 1990s for tearing down political advertisements.

Merchan implores the press to use 'common sense' when reporting jurors' descriptions

Merchan asked reporters to use "common sense" when describing the jurors' physical descriptions.

"There was really no need to mention that one of the jurors had an Irish accent," he said.

A juror has been excused from duty

Juror 2, the oncology nurse, has been excused from duty. As court started today, Merchan told lawyers on both sides that the juror called and conveyed that after sleeping on it, she had concerns about being fair and impartial.

She had concerns about her identity becoming public and said that friends and family have already inquired about whether she is a juror. The juror added that given these outside influences, she was concerned about her ability to be fair and impartial.

An oncology nurse, a corporate lawyer and a man with "no spare time": Meet the first 7 jury members of Trump’s hush money trial

The first seven people were selected to serve on the jury in Trump’s  hush money trial  in New York on Tuesday after they made it clear to both sides that they could render a fair and impartial verdict.

They were chosen on the second day of the trial after prosecutors and the defense team whittled down  a group of 96 potential jurors . At one point, Merchan  admonished Trump after he observed him  audibly mouthing something  in the direction of one of the jurors, who had been asked about a social media post she made the day Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election.

“I won’t tolerate that,” Merchan said. “I will not have any jurors intimidated in this courtroom.” Trump’s lawyers ultimately eliminated the woman from the jury pool.

The seven chosen so far were sworn in Tuesday and directed by Merchan to return to court Monday.

Twelve people will be seated on the jury, and each side will select alternates. The trial is expected to last as long as eight weeks.

Read more on the seven jurors selected so far.

Day 3 begins

Merchan has taken the bench — a few minutes early — and started Day 3.

Trump is taking a phone call at the defense table

Trump is using his phone in the courtroom, openly flouting the rules of the courtroom. Blanche just told him to stop and Trump tucked the phone in his pocket while looking annoyed.

Prosecutors seek to ask Trump about civil fraud, E. Jean Carroll cases and more if he testifies in hush money case

Dareh Gregorian

Prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office said in a court filing yesterday that they plan to ask Trump about the  costly verdicts  and findings of wrongdoing in his numerous civil cases if the former president decides to  testify in the criminal case  — though the permissibility of that line of questioning remains to be seen.

The prosecutors said they intend to ask Trump about the judgment in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ civil fraud suit against him and his company, as well as a pair of verdicts in lawsuits brought by writer E. Jean Carroll. The judgments in the three cases total  almost $550 million  and include findings that Trump  committed fraud  in the AG’s case and that he is liable for  sexual abuse  and  defamation  in the Carroll case.

District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office also plans to mention findings by the judge in the civil fraud case that Trump  violated a gag order  and “ testified untruthfully  under oath” during the trial.

Prosecutors said they want to be able to bring up those findings — which  Trump is appealing  — “to impeach the credibility of the defendant” if he takes the witness stand.

Trump said last week he  “absolutely“ plans to testify  but is under no obligation to do so.

Trump lawyers in Florida classified docs case seek more time to meet deadlines in order to "defend him in New York and before this Court"

In a filing today, Trump’s legal team representing him in the classified documents against him in Florida are seeking more time to meet deadlines in order for them to “defend him in New York and before this Court.”

Trump’s lawyers argue that their client and his counsel “cannot prepare — or even discuss — the required filings anywhere but an appropriate SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility), a virtually impossible task given” the former president and his lawyers Blanche and Emil Bove’s involvement in the hush money trial.

“The special counsel’s office argues President Trump’s constitutional rights are ‘not implicated’ because his counsel has had ‘months to prepare the submissions at issue’ and will ‘only be in trial four days a week in New York,’” Trump’s lawyers wrote in the filing. “This premise is untethered to reality and disregards the substantial motion practice that has occurred before this Court.”

Trump departs Trump Tower

Brittany Kubicko

Trump has left Trump Tower and is headed to the courthouse for Day 3 of his hush money trial.

Fiery exchanges over Facebook posts and Trump’s behavior mark second day of trial

Jonathan Allen

The first seven jurors were selected for Trump’s hush money trial Tuesday amid a battle over prospective jurors’ old Facebook posts and calls to “lock him up” and the judge’s warning that the former president should not try to intimidate the panelists who will be deciding his fate.

“I will not have any jurors intimidated in this courtroom. I want to make this crystal clear,” Merchan told Trump and Blanche outside the jurors' presence. Merchan told Blanche his client was “audibly” saying something in the direction of the juror while she was “12 feet away from your client.”

Merchan said that he didn’t know what Trump was saying but that he’d been “muttering” and “gesturing” at the juror, and he directed Blanche to talk to his client about his behavior. Blanche then whispered something into Trump’s ear.

The incident underscores Trump’s penchant for acting up in court and the problems his lawyers might have keeping him in check. He spoke loudly in front of jurors during the E. Jean Carroll defamation trial and at one point stormed out of his civil fraud trial — two trials he appeared at voluntarily. His presence is required in the criminal case, and the trial could last as long as eight weeks.

The current drama came on the second day of jury selection as seven jurors were selected for the case. The jury is anonymous, so their names weren’t used in open court, but panelists include a lawyer, a salesman, an oncology nurse, an IT consultant, a teacher and a software engineer. The seven were sworn in and told to return to court Monday.

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The first jurors have now been chosen for Trump’s criminal hush money trial after a cross-section of Manhattan residents openly revealed their views of the likely GOP nominee. NBC’s Laura Jarrett reports for "TODAY."

On trial off-day, Trump complains about jury selection process for his criminal case

Trump ripped the jury selection process in his historic New York criminal trial yesterday, the day after the first seven jurors were selected out of a pool of almost 100 people.

Posting about the hush money trial on its scheduled off-day, Trump — who has repeatedly accused the judge in the case of being biased against him — suggested incorrectly that he should be entitled to unlimited strikes of potential jurors in his criminal case.

“I thought STRIKES were supposed to be ‘unlimited’ when we were picking our jury? I was then told we only had 10, not nearly enough when we were purposely given the 2nd Worst Venue in the Country,” he wrote on Truth Social before he decried the criminal cases against him as “election interference” and part of a “witch hunt.”

Under New York law, each side does have an unlimited number of strikes “for cause,”   but Merchan, the judge presiding over the case, can decide whether or not that cause is worthy of a strike.

The two sides are also entitled to a limited number of “peremptory strikes” — potential jurors they can dismiss. Because Trump is charged with a Class E felony, which is a lower-level felony, he and prosecutors are entitled to 10 peremptory challenges each. (The number goes up to 20 for defendants facing the highest level of felony charge, Class A.)

While Merchan has dismissed scores of potential jurors who said they could not be impartial or had scheduling conflicts, he has dismissed only two for cause in the two days since jury selection began . One was a person who had written “lock him up” of Trump in a 2017 social media post. Merchan denied some other Trump cause dismissal requests, including one for a woman who had posted on Facebook about celebrating Joe Biden’s 2020 election win.

Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche then used one of his peremptory challenges to remove the woman.

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Trump hush money trial resumes with jury selection after day off

Jury selection is set to resume in former President Donald Trump's hush money trial in New York City after a break in action yesterday.

With seven jurors already having been selected from a pool of 96, the schedule for today will focus largely on questioning potential jurors in a second group of the same size to see whether they can be fair and impartial when it comes to Trump. State Judge Juan Merchan has said he hopes to have 12 jurors, as well as alternates, selected by the end of tomorrow.

Prosecutors and lawyers for Trump will have less opportunity to dismiss potential jurors going forward, because both used six of their 10 peremptory challenges Tuesday.

While both sides can make an unlimited number of challenges for cause, it is up to the judge to decide whether to grant those challenges and strike those jurors. Merchan dismissed two jurors for cause Tuesday, one of whom had posted a “lock him up” message about Trump on Facebook, but he denied some other challenges.