Author: ken (nordine@wordjazz.com)
Posted: 03/10/97 22:21
> Microsoft is digitizing all the world's imagery;
> the French ministery of culture is creating a database of the nation's
art and
> I am archiving my own 50 years of art, created in various media, on
CD ROMs!
>
> Until recently, translating art from one medium into another necessarily
altered certain aspects of an image, a phenomenon described as image degradation;
and copying work originally created with traditional media into a digital
environment inherently carries the dangers of significant quality losses
and shifts in the perception of content due to the changes in environment
or rendition.
> The most obvious loss in this process is the surface quality of the
artwork; a feature that determines the qualitative and tactile differences
between the conventional media of art, such as oil painting, watercolors,
lithography or photography. Thus surface identity is commonly sacrificed
in reproduction.
> But any type of image degradation, occurs only once in the digital
reproduction process, and its opposite: image enhancement, provides a new
potential heretofore unavailable. Once an image is in digital form, cloning
can be consistent and exact.
>
> When artists translate traditional artwork into digital media and
they themselves make all the requisite aesthetic decisions and compromises,
their work can henceforth be duplicated, ad infinitum without any needed
alteration to what is now the artist's own (new, adaptive) rendition.
>
> Certain aspects of a picture may change, but does it always have to
be for the worse, or can we simply accept different qualities in the new
context?
> Are these aesthetic decisions that should only be made by the artists
themselves?