Digital art may very well be the most popular of the fine arts ever, at least by measure of the thousands of digital art sites that abound today on the Internet. Since the advent of the computer in the 1980s, and even earlier, digital art has always had its enthusiasts. But it lurked in those days within a complex and difficult technology accessible only to a sophisticated and technically adept elite, who largely traded digital screen images among themselves. There were few, if any, gallery shows. Print technology in the late 1980s had not yet caught up with the needs of the artist, and prints were costly and difficult to produce, especially at “large output” size. This changed about a decade ago.

Dedicated digital art software began to appear in the early 1990s, especially for the Macintosh, which soon became a workhorse for graphic (read: advertising) artists. Photoshop was (and is) the most popular of these software programs, which some years ago was ported to the PC, where most digital artists now work.

But not less important to the development of computer art was the advent of the inkjet printer, which brought an exacting and inexpensive print technology into the hands of artists everywhere, even the technically-challenged. Originally, and still, known as giclée, a French word meaning “to spray,” this process was first used successfully by makers of the Iris printer and then widely adopted by Canon, Hewlett Packard, Epson, Roland, Mutah, and other manufacturers. Further, companies with traditional technologies for the design and manufacture of architectural and engineering plotters, which were capable of turning out blueprint-sized prints, now largely abandoned the plotter with its fixed one-color pens for the more dramatic inkjet which mixed the inks and sprayed them onto the print surface with astonishing fidelity to the screen image. Paper and ink manufacturers climbed the bandwagon to the new technology, and even a canvas was produced for the new printers. Artists were now afforded the means routinely to turn out “exhibition-quality” prints as wide as 48 inches and even wider and longer. Digital gallery shows were proliferating, a “large-output” fine art print industry was developing, colleges were teaching the technology, magazines were published specializing in the inkjet field, and brick-and-mortar art museums were presenting digital art on their walls. By the turn of the new century digital art had found its market.

Don Archer
Director
MOCA: Museum of Computer Art
March 29, 2003