From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics

In my dissertation, From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics, I argue for a definition of a "digital method" that can be articulated without reference to the technicalities of contemporary hardware and software. I allow, however, the possibility that this digital method can acquire new characteristics when it is performed by computational technology. I therefore treat the artworks covered in my dissertation as sensuous artifacts that are subject to change based on the constraints and affordances of the tools used in their making. But insofar as it describes a series of technological operations, the word digital often references the tool used to make the art but does not help a viewer/user relate to the art as a sensorially apprehensible artifact. Consequently, I gather together artworks that disclose visible evidence of their digital construction in order to identify the perceptible characteristics of digitally processed artifacts. I foreground not the hidden operations of computers---the intricacies of binary code and programming languages---but rather the surface qualities of digital graphics. While acknowledging that internal processes govern the aesthetic properties of these surfaces, I investigate the extent to which it is possible to encounter digitality at the level of the interface. Taking into account that the sensuous object will be informed by an underlying conceptual and technological framework or genotype, I set out to discover whether certain phenotypic aspects of digitality will be inherently accessible at a phenomenological level.;When do digital artifacts overcome their dubious status as mere demonstrations of technical novelty, and become artworks worthy of serious consideration? What is the importance of digital technology as an artistic medium, and how do affordances and constraints and technical parameters of digital processing influence the sensible configurations of computationally generated artifacts?;My dissertation examines a subset of digital image-making practices that suppress virtualization in order to examine the structural principles undergirding digital graphics. In parsing these often abstract, highly formalized pictorial strategies, I conclude that they convey a different aesthetic and architectonic sensibility than analog depictions.;Chapter One outlines the theoretical models used to differentiate digital and analog properties, and illustrates how and why art historical discourse has accorded value to artworks based on analog principles, such as fineness of color, texture, and line. It argues that discrete, particulate digital artifacts are constructed according to different principles than analog artifacts, which are relatively smooth and continuous with no absolute division between parts. My review of the formal characteristics of digital systems sets the stage for my argument that an observable model of digital facture---a digital method---preexists electronic, binary computers and that this digital process results in a digital aesthetic. In my second chapter, I support the claims of the preceding chapter by evaluating the extent to which the work of several modernist painters, including Paul Cezanne, Georges Seurat, and Paul Klee, exhibits constitutive features of a digital system. I argue that understanding these artists' roles as experimenters with a digital method adds a new dimension to the theoretical, aesthetic, and historical significance of their work.;The following two chapters provide comparisons between artists who apply a digital method without electronic computation and artists whose digital aesthetic is computationally driven. Chapter 3 attempts to recuperate the value and relevance of Op-Artist Victor Vasarely. Through an inspection of his writings and his algorithmic painting practices, I trace Vasarely's lifelong goal to develop a programmable visual language, and demonstrate how, without ever touching a computer, he was attempting in his practice to adopt a visual model of a digital system. In the second half of the chapter, I introduce the example of Marius Watz's computationally-generated homage to Vasarely's work in order to ascertain whether the use of a computer alters the visible qualities of Vasarely's plastic language. In Chapter 4, I examine Casey Reas's fraught and often contradictory response to the legacy of conceptual art in programming-based practices. Through a comparison between Reas and Sol LeWitt, I maintain that Reas occupies an oscillatory position with respect to the values traditionally attached to analog aesthetics, such as immediacy and uniqueness/irreproducibility. By mobilizing algorithmically encoded instructions to automate artistic production, Reas reinforces the turn away from the cult of the artist achieved in conceptual art. But at the same time, Reas's fascination with handmadeness and organicism preserves a link to analog aesthetic principles. Finally, my conclusion assays the discursive resonances between Jason Salavon's software-based computational "paintings" and the increasingly widespread use of information visualization as primary mode of mapping the vast amounts of data produced by the mechanisms of the "culture industry".;The works under consideration in my dissertation cohere around questions and problems related to painting. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).