Digital Love: Pixel Perfect

The latest trend of digital art is taking the screens of festivals, art collectors and artists by storm. And modern connoisseurs are quick to click on it! Hello! Gets you the low-down

- Radhika Bhalla

An artificial, blood-red sun rises above a river; a hot air balloon disperses into a pastiche of urban landscape; and a picture-perfect face with hollow eyes stares straight from your screen… The future of art — or rather, digital art — has arrived. And it’s taking over the pixels of experimental collectors.

Of course, digital art is hardly a new phenomenon. Andy Warhol used the Amiga computer back in 1985 to create fresh works, and a floppy disk found 30 years later revealed a rendering of his famous Campbell’s soup can and another of Botticelli’s ‘The Birth of Venus’, with Venus boasting three eyes. Prior to that, in the early 1960s, American animator John Whitney created a geometrically-based artwork... But what does digital art look like at present?

DIGITAL ART TODAY
As Jaya Asokan, Fair Director at India Art Fair, explains, “The boundaries and binaries between what constitutes ‘art’ are shifting, and digital art is becoming a more accessible and collectible art form, especially among a new millennial generation of collectors, who will be instrumental in shaping the art market of the future.”

With traditional hierarchies and power structures being broken down, as Asokan states, there’s much to look forward to. And Smriti Rajgarhia, Director of Serendipity Arts Foundation and the annual, Goa-based Serendipity Arts Festival, shares the emerging types of digital artwork: “With new technological developments, including ChatGPT, Notion and other AI-based platforms, art processes are undergoing a change of context. AI works have become more prolific on our social media feeds, and newer ways of seeing are on the rise.”