Forgive me up front. No rant today. I’m deep in the digital wars as artist and theorist. This blog will consist of reports from that front....Here’s what I think is the single most surprising thing about digital art. People on the outside think there’s this ONE weird new thing loose in the world. In fact, that one thing has quickly fragmented. There’s already a dozen kinds of digital art. Surprising, right?

The biggest camp is Photoshoppers playing with photos. Many people learned Photoshop at work; thousands more had to learn it to teach it, especially photographers in academe. Suddenly all these photographers were making collages in Photoshop and calling the results "digital art." Or somebody takes a picture of a girl friend, drops a filter on her so the girl friend looks new and weird. The interesting issue in most Photoshop work is when does a photographic object become a digital art object? (The emerging answer: when there’s a significant change.)

Another big group is making conceptual art and calling it digital art. Remember all that stuff artists were doing in the 1980s? Idea art, let’s call it. But you incorporate a computer in the process, and then you’ve made digital art. So they say. Suppose one screen shows a man, and the other screen shows a woman, and the images morph back and forth. This tells us something deep about gender identities. So they say. And you clearly do need a computer to handle your morphs. But why call it digital art?

Another huge group is making what these artists called “computer art” or “computer-generated art.” (Personally, I avoid these phrases and like to say: “My art is artist-generated.”) But computer artists take pride in making art that announces its pedigree. See that transparency? That precision? See the peculiar strangeness that you can make only on a computer? This, friends, is computer art and you should like it, apparently, because it’s made on a computer. Is that a sequitur? I think these artists quickly run up against what we might call the fine art dilemma. The public doesn’t care so much about how art is made as they care about the bottom line: is the art pretty, memorable, or meaningful? In the end, computer art has to pass the same aesthetic threshold that every pencil sketch and watercolor has to pass. Is it art? Is it good art?

A close relative to the computer artist is the programmer artist. These people write programs that make the computer make something pretty or interesting. Engineers and techies fill this arena.

A lot of digital artists are using digital tools to replicate the look of traditional media, whether oils or acrylics or airbrush or charcoal. You’ll see great displays of talent in this direction. I could discuss the pros and cons but conceptually there’s not much to discuss beyond the initial question: should a new medium be used to mimic an older medium?

Another main group is fine artists trying to make bold new art, the kind of stuff you see in ArtNews or a good gallery--but they want to do it with digital tools. Turns out the computer, though just a cold machine, is a great friend to the experimentalist, take-a-shot-in-the-dark type of artist. I’m in this group.

I didn’t get to video, animation, scifi, 3D, installation and all that wonderful commercial graphics we see on TV (ESPN is hot in this area). In future reports, I’ll revisit the groups. I’ll discuss all aspects of digital art. If you don’t agree with me, send a succinct comment. I see this space as educational so I’ll include slings and arrows.