It's Digital but is it Art 01

  Digitally-produced or enhanced artworks can certainly be creative, exciting and beautiful to look at. But there continues to be debate and controversy over whether "digital art" should be classified as art. Is manipulating a piece of computer software on a screen a comparable skill to that of manipulating paint and other media on canvas or paper? There's no denying that "digital art" is flourishing.

  Digital Art can be original art produced entirely digitally i.e. on a computer without paints and canvas or any other traditional media, or a manually painted canvas that is scanned and then digitally enhanced in any of a variety of software packages (e.g. Painter, Photoshop). Even photographs digitally enhanced with artistic effects fall under this broad term, as does fractal art, which is automatically generated with very little human input.The tools needed to produce digital art have been around for many years but have undergone a revolution in the past 10 years and are now rich in features that enable digital artists to create works that would have been previously impossible.

  And these tools are improving all the time. Although it is rather ironic that the improvements to the packages are often measured by how life-like the results produced can be. And by how similar the digital effect is to that created with a real paintbrush. The manufacturers and advocates of digital art tools could emphasise the different and unique effects that they can create, yet they actually promote the similarities to traditional media.But digital artworks are without doubt creative, and they can be original, evocative, intriguing, beautiful. But there continues to be debate and controversy over whether "digital art" is "real" art. Is the skill and talent required to manipulate a piece of computer software comparable to true artistic talent. And shouldn't art communicate something to the viewer. Some forms of digital art (such as fractals) are randomly generated images. In this case, if nothing is being communicated then how can the work be classified as art.