Italian version
Ê .hacktivism
10.04.03 Digital Art Museum, history of technological art.
Is it possible to contextualize the current evolutions of digital art, through Internet and every new media, without other references? The history of digital art is useful precisely to understand how the evolution of the media has conditioned the creative process and the development of poetics, as well as giving birth to new kinds of social aggregations. Digital Art Museum has taken on this mission: distribute essays and works belonging to the recent history of digital art which, given the speed of technology, seems already very ancient. This online project gives birth to the current berlinese chapter of the organization, which has started to collect material which dates as far back as 1956 and integrated it with biographies of the authors (many of which are kindly provided by the Leonardo journal), bibliographies and interviews. The main criterion of classification is to divide the works in three periods: 1. '1956-1958 The pioneers', when artists and visual experimenters began writing the first aesthetic computer programs; 2. '1986 - 1996 The Paintbox era', when the emphasis wasn't on computer programming anymore but on the use of paint programs, together with the first scanners; 3. '1996 - 2006 The multimedia era', with Internet and interactivity imposing new models of relationship between the artist and his audience. Browsing the site's webpages, it's clear that this is an essential online resource for studying the history of digital art, difficult to do without if you want to understand the thousands facets of net art.