Introduction


Today, however, painters and photographers are having to re-examine their positions. Millions of images of every sort fly about the ether of the cyberspace in the queer code of digital systems, appearing upon command, evaporating just as quickly. Eyes take them in; minds react to them. Questions abound -- Can we still call them paintings? or photographs? or, as we suspect, is something new emerging? I know at least this much: digital manipulation of both photographed and drawn images has already rendered the old debate between painters and photographers mute. The digitage, as a method of working, has evolved rapidly as computers and software allow increasingly complex manipulations of multiple images in new orders of integration. And, as might be expected, the final form is less and less a permanency fixed on paper or canvas, but increasingly a luminous metaphor meant for the computer screen. This luminosity itself touches the eye quite differently than the reflected surfaces of works on paper or canvas. With many of these digital works we seem to be looking into or through the pictures rather that at them. In such an environment the idea of surface becomes irrelevant, a fact that has given new powers to the artist to establish connections that were previously denied to him or her.


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Intangible