A Debate About Art and Technology

Since there has been technology there as been a debate about what is art and what is not. For instance, many people argue that electronic music isn't nearly at the same caliber as music created on an instrument like a guitar or piano. One argument suggests that electronic music can't possibly recreate the same sound as an actual guitar, nor is the process of creating the music the same: instead of manipulating your hands into specific positions and training your body to produce the correct sound, you merely press a button in some cases.

As technology becomes more advanced there are more people arguing for and against the use of electronics to create art. However, more people seem to be accepting that digital art is an acceptable kind of art. You may not be painting a portrait with paint and a brush on a canvas, but it can be just as difficult and require as much practice to get a computer program to "paint" the same portrait.

The following videos contain what I would consider various forms of art. The first video is a recording of a concert that involves real and artificial "artists." The singer is actually a hologram, and the vocals were produced electronically. Notice that there are also live musicians on the stage. I would consider this concert a collaboration between a number of artists from different fields. The instrumentalists are certainly artists, as music is an art. The hologram isn't what I would call an artist, but she is definitely a work of art created by computer programmers and engineers who learned how to manipulate computer programs to create visual and audio art.

The second video comes from a movie I am a huge fan of. Final Fantasy: Advent Children is an amazing work of cinematic art, which involved a collaboration between writers (artists), computer programers (artists), voice actors (artists) and probably many more types of artists in charge of types of art I may not even be aware of. The visuals within the movie could compete with the best realism drawers or painters, and undoubtedly it took a lot of skill to learn how to manipulate the programs required to create the movie.

Digital art does not need to be automatically cast aside just because it doesn't produce "organic" or "real" artwork that must be touched with the artist's hand. The definition of art is very broad and includes unrelated things like painting, dancing, and culinary arts. Why should digital art be any different?