Every time technology moves ahead, invading the world of art, we are presented with exciting new opportunities along with difficult challenges. Such is the case with the advent of digitally enhanced painting. Digital enhancement allows us to push the envelope, invent new forms of expression, add rich dimension to old forms, and step into the refreshing world of the unexplored.
Although digital enhancement is resisted by some people for what are probably excellent reasons, it is embraced by others for reasons just as laudable. One of the most persuasive arguments for digital enhancement is that art is not what is painted on the artistÆs canvas with a brush; it is the magnificent thing in his soul that he is trying to convey somehow to canvas so that it can be communicated to others. Digital enhancement allows the artist to go beyond the limitations of what can be done with the brush and more fully achieve what is in the soul. In this sense, it violates none of the purposes of art but actually helps fulfill them.
As artist Joseph Nechvatal stated in his paper given at the "Photography, Painting and Sculpture: Working Digitally" conference in February 2005,
For me, the digital has brought back from the dead the practice of painting. It has made it alhve. It has made it bloom in the enthusiastic and relevant sense of the word alive - but it has made painting alive in a more specific sense also, as I began mixing my digital painting practice with techniques of artificial life (a-life). Therefore the digital as applied to painting excites me -- and this excitement allows me to work with passion (1).
Nechvatal, a post-postmodern artist who terms himself a ôviractualist,ö goes on to explain that
painting must reflect the digital if it is to be other than a stinking cadaver. Painting must be digital to be, as Susan Sontag wrote in Against Interpretation, "a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousnes...