As the computer becomes more accessible, especially from the 1980s / 90s, the possibilities for artistic experimentation with computational resources begin to expand.
Questioning spatiotemporal distances, creating environments that expand the perceptive field of the interactor, creating specific spaces for cooperation, where users experience, share, transform and intensify ways of feeling and seeing the world, working with issues in the area of biology and artificial life since then is the focus of experimentation in digital media.
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Generative Art and Computational Creativity
For some theorists, like Edmond Couchot artistic practices that use computational resources could be divided into two major perspectives:
- those works that seek to focus their studies much more on the results fixed on the monitor screen, of which the works in computer art and the experiments in animation and animation cinema are some examples
- those works that are attentive to the theory of cybernetics and the possibilities of feedback offered by informational technologies, seeks to focus its studies in the field of interactivity, that is, in the participation of the interactor through the mediation of an interface.
In strictly technical terms, the interface is generally considered to be a device that allows the exchange of information between systems that can be both of the same nature.
for example:
- two computers of different natures
- the computer and the user.
It thus establishes a double channel of information between man and machine: through input and output organs of information ( input and output ), it allows a man’s action, from the simplest, such as pressing the keyboard, is recognized, processed by the machine and returned to the user in real-time.
It is not by chance that a number of theorists in the field of digital media art (such as Anne-Marie Duguet) say that interfaces – from the most common ones such as mice, keyboards, touch screens, and etc., should be seen as the very heart of media arts since they would not only explain the form of development of the work, but also the way in which the public relates to the work.
Lev Manovich, on the other hand, in his essay “Post-Media Aesthetic”, goes so far as to affirm that the history of art is not only the history of its stylistic innovations but also the history of the new forms of interfaces developed by scientific artists. And in his book The Language of New Media, affirms that the interface becomes not only one of the primordial elements of the computer society but also an element that allows breaking with the old dichotomy between form and content, since “the content and the interface are mixed in such a way that can no longer be thought of as separate entities “.
It is interesting to note that a number of artists have been exploring, each in their own way, interfaces that, in addition to the mouse and keyboard, examine more daring mechanisms of signal capture and translation.