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The Evolution of Digital Art

Until the late 20th century, the graphic-design area was based on hand-craft processes: layouts being stylised by hand so as to visualize an idea; type was specified and ordered from a typesetter; and type proofs and photostats of images were assembled in position on heavy paper or board for photo copying and platemaking. Over the course of the 1980s and early ’90s, however, rapid changes in digital pc hardware and software radically altered graphic design.

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

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

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

The digital change in graphic design was followed quickly by public access to the Internet. A completely new sphere of graphic-design activity bloomed in the mid-1990s when Internet commerce became a growing sector of the global economy, causing organisations and businesses to quickly establish websites. Designing a web-site involves layout of screens of information rather than of physical pages, but approaches to the use of type, images, and colour are similar to those used for print. Web design, however, requires a host of new things to consider, including designing for navigation around the website and for using hypertext links to see additional information. An example of strong web design is the Herman Miller for the Home Web site, designed by BBK Studio in 1998. These designers created a purposeful visual identity, effective navigation, and informational clarity. Attributes that contributed to the effectiveness of this Web site included a consistent colour palette, an informative use of pictures of products, and a scrolling montage of products.

Because of the world-wide usefulness and reach of the internet, the graphic-design sector is becoming increasingly global in scope. In addition, the blending of motion graphics, animation, video feeds, and music into web-site design has brought about the merging of traditional print and broadcast media. As kinetic media expand from motion pictures and basic television to scores of cable-television channels, video games, and animated Web sites, motion graphics are becoming an increasingly important area of graphic design.

In the 21st century, graphic design is everywhere; it is a major component of our complex print and electronic information systems. It permeates contemporary society, delivering information, product identification, entertainment, and persuasive messages. The ongoing advance of technology has dramatically changed the way graphic designs are created and distributed to a mass market. However, the fundamental role of the graphic designer, providing expressive form and clarity of content to communicate messages, remains the same.

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What is Sculpture?

Sculpture is an art form in which hard or plastic materials are shaped into three-dimensional items. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments varying from tableaux to contexts that envelop the spectator. A massive variety of materials are often used, including clay, wax, stone, metal, fabric, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random “found” objects. Materials are carved, modeled, molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn, assembled, or purely shaped and combined.

Sculpture is not a fixed term that can be applied to a permanently circumscribed category of objects or set of activities. It is, rather, the name given to art that grows and changes and continually extends the range of its activities and evolving new kinds of objects. The definition of the term grew much wider in the later half of the 20th century than as it had been only two or three decades previously, and in the evolving state of art at the dawn of the 21st century, one simply cannot predict what its future dimensions are going to become.

There are some features which in previous centuries were considered to be essential to sculpture but are now no longer present in a big part of modern sculpture and thus no longer form part of its definition. One of the most elementary points of these is representation. Prior to the 20th century, sculpture was seen to be a representational art; one that imitated forms in life, mostly human figures but also inanimate objects, such as game, utensils, and books. Since the dawn of the 20th century, however, sculpture also began to include nonrepresentational forms. It has long been accepted that forms of such functional 3D objects as furniture, pots, and buildings can be expressive and beautiful without having to be in any way representational. It was only in the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, 3D works of art began to be an art form in and of themselves.

Previous to the 20th century, sculpture was regarded as fundamentally an art of solid form, or mass. It is true that the negative elements of sculpture — the voids and hollows inside and between its solid parts — have generally been to some extent an intricate part of any design, but that role was a secondary one. In a good deal of modern sculpture, however, the focus has shifted, and the spatial aspects have come out as dominant. Spatial sculpture is now a commonly acknowledged field of the art of sculpture.

It was also taken for granted in the sculpture of the past that its components had to be of a constant shape and size and, excepting works such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (a monumental weather vane), would not move. With modern developments of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its form can still be viewed as fundamental to defining the art.

Additionally, sculpture since the 20th century was no longer confined to the two traditional forming processes of carving and modeling, or to such traditional natural materials like stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. Because present-day sculptors can use any materials and methods of manufacture that serve their purpose, the definition of the art form can no longer be identified with any particular kind of materials or techniques.

After all these changes, there is probably only one area that remains constant in sculpture, and it emerges as the foremost abiding concern of sculptors: the art of sculpture is a part of the visual arts that is especially concerned with the creation of art in 3D.

Sculpture might be either in the round or in relief. A sculpture in the round consists of a separate, detached item in its own right, possessing a similar independent existence in reality as a human body or a chair. A relief does not possess this independant form. It is part of and projects from or is an inextricable part of something else that may serve either as a background to it or a matrix from whence it emerges.

The actual 3-D nature of sculpture in the round puts restrictions on its scope in certain respects in comparison with the scope of painting. Sculpture will not cast the illusion of space with purely optical means, or invest its shape with atmosphere and light as we might see in painting. But sculpture does proffer a realistic experience, a vivid physical presence that is denied in the pictorial arts. Sculpture can be tangible as well as visible, and appeal strongly and directly to our tactile and visual sense. Even the visually impaired, including those who are congenitally blind, can produce and appreciate certain forms of sculpture. It was, in fact, stated by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be regarded as primarily an art of touch and that the roots of sculptural forms can be found in the pleasure that we experience in touching things.

All three-D forms are regarded as exhibiting an expressive character as well as purely geometric properties. They may come across to the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and more. By exploiting the emotive qualities of form, artists are able to create imagery in which subject matter and expressiveness mutually reinforce each other. This imagery will go beyond the pure presentation of fact and evoke a huge range of subtle and powerful feelings.

The aesthetic raw material used is, so to speak, the whole realm of expressive 3D form. A sculpture may draw upon what already exists in the endless worlds of natural and man-made form, or it may be an art of pure invention. It has been mastered to express a huge range of human emotions and feelings from the subtly tender and delicate to the highly violent and ecstatic.

All human beings, intimately involved from birth with the world of three-D form, know something of its structural and expressive aspects and develop emotional responses to them. This combination of understanding and sensitive reaction, also known as a sense of form, may be cultivated and refined. It is to this sense of form that sculpture primarily appeals.

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