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The Evolution of Digital Art

Up until the late 20th century, the graphic-design area was based on hand-craft processes: layouts being drawn by hand so as to bring into being a design; type was specified and ordered from a typesetter; and type proofs and photostats of images were placed into position on heavy paper or card for photo copying and platemaking. Over the course of the 1980s and early ’90s, however, rapid advances in digital pc hardware and software utterly changed graphic design.

Software for Apple’s 1984 Macintosh pc, such as the MacPaint program 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 allowed designers and artists to use computer graphics in a new, intuitive manner. The Postscript™ page-description language from Adobe Systems, Inc., allowed for pages of type and images to be assembled into graphic designs on screen. By the mid-1990s, the development of design from drafting-table action to an on-screen computer action was basically complete.

Personal computers allowed typesetting tools to be placed into the hands of individual designers, and so a time of experimentation occurred in the design of new and unusual typefaces and page layouts. Type and images were layered, fragmented, and dismembered; type columns were overlapped and run at very long or short line lengths, and the sizes, weights, and typefaces were sometimes changed within single headlines, columns, and words. Much of this research took place 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 graphic design.

Rapid advances in onscreen software also allowed designers to make elements transparent; to stretch, scale, and bend them; to layer type and graphics in mid-space; and to connect 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. Placed together, these images show a rich expression of Olmsted’s life and work.

The digital revolution in graphic design was shortly followed by public access to the internet. A whole new sphere of graphic-design activity bloomed in the mid-1990s when internet commerce became a growth sector of the global economy, causing companies and businesses to quickly establish websites. Designing a Web site involves layout of screens of information rather than of 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 through the web-site and for using hypertext links to jump to additional information. An example of strong Web design is the Herman Miller for the Home Web site, designed by BBK Studio in 1998. These designers created a purposeful visual identity, effective navigation, and informational clarity. Attributes that added to the effectiveness of this Web site included a pleasing colour palette, an informative use of pictures of products, and a scrolling imagery of products.

Because of the world-wide attraction and reach of the Internet, the graphic-design business is becoming increasingly global in scope. Moreover, the integration 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 widespread; it is a major component of the complex print and electronic information systems. It permeates contemporary society, bringing information, product identification, entertainment, and persuasive messages. The relentless advance of technology has dramatically changed the way graphic design is created and distributed to a mass audience. However, the essential role of the graphic designer, adding creative 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 molded into three-D works. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments that range from tableaux to contexts around the spectator. An unrestricted variety of material may be used, including clay, wax, stone, metal, fabric, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random “found” objects. Materials will be carved, modeled, molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn, assembled, or simply shaped and combined.

Sculpture is not a fixed label that applies to a permanently restricted category of objects or set of activities. It is, rather, the name of an art that is growing and is changing and is continually extending the range of its activities and evolving new designs of objects. The definition of the term grew much wider in the later half of the 20th century than as it had been merely two or three decades previously, and in the fluid state of visual art at the start of the 21st century, it is impossible to predict what its future possibilities are likely to see.

Certain features which in previous centuries were considered essential to sculpture but are not present in a majority of modern sculpture and can no longer form part of the definition. One of the most significant of these is representation. Before the 20th century, sculpture was regarded as a representational art; one that imitated forms in life, mostly of human figures but also inanimate objects, including game, utensils, and books. At the beginning of the 20th century, however, sculpture has also included nonrepresentational forms. It began to be accepted that the forms of such functional three-D objects as furniture, pots, and buildings can be expressive and beautiful without having to be representational. It was only during the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, three-dimensional works of art began to be common practice.

Prior to the 20th century, sculpture was considered essentially an art of solid form, or mass. Whilte the negative elements of sculpture — the voids and hollows underneath and between its solid areas — have usually been to some extent an inextricable part of its design, but this role was a secondary one. In a large field of modern sculpture, however, the focus of attention has deepened, and the spatial aspects have started to come out as dominant. Spatial sculpture is now a fully accepted area of the art.

It was also taken for granted in the past ideas of sculpture that its components consisted of a constant shape and size and, with the exception of items such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (a monumental weather vane), should not move. With recent developements of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its form can still be viewed as inherent to defining the art of sculpture.

Additionally, sculpture since the 20th century was no longer limited to the two traditional forming methods of carving and modeling, or to such traditional natural materials including stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. Now that today’s sculptors can use any materials and methods of manufacture that they wish to, the definition of sculpture can no longer be identified with any special kind of materials or techniques.

After all these changes, there is probably just one element that has remained constant in the art of sculpture, and it endures as the key abiding concern of sculptors: the art is a field of the visual arts that is especially concerned with the creation of form in 3D.

Sculpture should be either in the round or in relief. A sculpture in the round is a separate, detached piece in its own right, possessing the same kind of independent existence in space as a human body or a chair. A sculpture in relief does not exist in this reality. It projects from and is attached to or is an inextricable part of some other object that might serve either as a background against which it is set or a matrix from which it emerges.

The actual three-dimensionality of sculpture in the round puts limitations on its scope in certain respects when compared with the scope of painting. Sculpture does not have the illusion of space by solely optical means, or invest its shape with atmosphere and light as painting can. But it does proffer a reality, a vivid physical presence that cannot be found in the pictorial arts. The forms of sculpture are tangible as well as visible, and may appeal strongly and directly to our tactile and visual senses. Even the visually impaired, even those who are congenitally blind, can construct and appreciate some types of sculpture. It was, in fact, said by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be regarded as primarily an art of touch and that the beginnings of sculptural work can be based on the pleasure we experience in fondling things.

All three-dimensional forms are seen as possessing an expressive character along with their pure geometric properties. They strike the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and more. By exploiting the evocative qualities of form, a sculptor is able to create images in which subject matter and expressiveness are mutually reinforcing of form. Such images can go beyond the mere presentation of fact and demand a vast range of subtle and powerful feelings.

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

All human beings, inherently involved from birth with the world of 3D form, realise something of its structural and expressive aspects and develop emotional responses to them. This combination of understanding and response, also known as a sense of form, can be cultivated and refined. It is to the sense of form that this art form primarily appeals.

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