How 6 Artists Are Intrepreting the Digital Art Landscape

We grew up on ‘90s arcade games, SEGA, and MS Paint—a pixelated aesthetic. MS Paint marked my childhood: full of blank sheets, different kinds of pencils, and being able to find the right color with just one click. Back then, I used Paint to draw dinosaurs, fairies, and space, but also to explore sexuality. I remember gathering with my girlfriends at my place and drawing what girls and boys have under their clothes. It was fun for us, and the drawings could be easily deleted with one click, so that no one could know what we were drawing. Later on, during my university years, I came back to MS Paint and used it as my personal diary. I guess this is how the naked pixelated girl emerged. Shouting with a wide-open mouth, she loudly encourages herself, another woman, or a man. She loves with passion and courageously deals with various life situations. She is strong; she is strength itself. I eventually wanted to bring that girl to life by transferring her from a digital image to oil on canvas (more specifically, enamel on canvas) in a traditional way, painting her manually, pixel by pixel, using no standstill or tape—exactly the way I would do it in MS Paint. Due to its glossiness, enamel is very effective in replicating the digital screen shine. MS Paint unfortunately went defunct in 2015, so now I am obliged to use other paint programs; however, my mind still thinks in pixels.

I believe the evolution of technology navigates towards truth if there is any—and so does painting. While pursuing the understanding of humanity, generations of technologies are left behind as not only trash on Earth, but also as documents human evolution. Sometimes when you run into old drawings—operating rudimentarily as designed by their tech devices, it just hits you that they were designed for some “discontinued” human behaviors and visual fantasy.

The digital world, social media, and the Metaverse—technologies that grew up alongside me—formed my visual language. I use colors and forms to create characters that resonate with the early 21st century and the first 3-D residents in the digital world; these characters were not made as artwork but as the essential function of new technology. They are congruent to depictions of bulls and people in cave drawings—operating rudimentarily as designed by their creator. So, we are facing the term “Primitivism” once more in the digital world. Like an archaeologist looking at cave paintings for the first time, I have been fascinated with those raw, blurry 3-D forms from day one: they’re full of honesty, potential, bravery, mystery, and shock, as pieces of technology left behind for a generation that no longer exists. 

Art, artists, and technology are simply inseparable. The root of the word technology is the Ancient Greek techne, which means “the making of things;” encompassing craftsmanship, art, music, and other skilled practices. Artists are natural technologists. 

Tech has been intricately tangled up with art-making, vision and perception from the camera obscura to the oil-paint tube, and now the Internet and digital media. New technology always facilitates new ways of seeing—and new ways of seeing are the primary domain of the artist.

Robert Rauschenberg said, “If you don’t accept technology, you better go to another place because no place here is safe. Nobody wants to paint rotten oranges anymore.” Technology is not a theme, style, or trend. It is an ever-present reality. Many argue that technology distances us from our true nature, but I believe we are growing toward it. This idealism is woven into the images I make. We are part of a universe that flows with forward momentum. To be human is to engage with technology, and it’s imperative that artists engage to better understand our fears and ultimately take an active role in shaping our collective future.

By using 3-D software to produce my paintings, I wish to comment on this particular moment in human history in which simulation has become ever-present in our lives. The Metaverse, augmented reality, and NFTs are just recent examples of this trend. Video games, film, architecture, and design have already been producing visuals with 3-D programs for decades, but today it is just blooming through the proliferation of electronic devices. The software allows me simultaneously to work in the tradition of Representation, to depict a reality, while also constructing my own. I like to create confusion in the viewer’s head when they are looking at my paintings. I wish to investigate this delicate border between artificiality and reality, and thus produce high-resolution paintings. The craft involved in executing the works is an effort to resist digitization. But it is a doomed effort because the war between humans and computers is already lost.

People experience a sensual state when the boundary between real and digital becomes blurred; due to exposure to digital-based visual language, incoherent, nonmaterial images have spread deeply in our daily lives.

By putting digital-based nonmaterial images into analog reality, I try to use the senses to reestablish the border between “virtual” and “real.” My primary process is derived from an error in calculating the output value of a digital image represented by a computer. Due to the instability of digital programs, computers twist the inputs and outputs for unknown reasons and produce blurred results, distinct from the original purpose. Although this is technically a failed result, the unintended image drifts along the border of real and digital.

I intentionally distort what I’ve collected through the web. The airbrush helps me recreate the digital image that has “failed” on top of a flat or structural surface. I create a distinct harmony from the disharmony of the image, in which familiar objects are derailed into surreal transformation.