Editorial of the special issue "Technology and digital art"

Digital art, as it is known in our time, entered the world of art in the late 1990s when cultural institutions such as museums and art galleries started progressively to include digital art installations in their exhibitions to support initiatives in this field. This was the result of some 50 years of previous experiments and seminal works exploring technology and mechanical devices to render artistic creations, a process that started around the 1920s. Artists like Marcel Duchamp and La´szlo´Moholy-Nagy introduced the concepts of interaction and virtuality in artwork. John Cage has explored the new concepts of automatically controlled randomness and instruction-based algorithms in music composition; pioneers as Grahame Weinbren, Nam to mention only few names, have explored the concept of random access in audio and computer-generated images. Digital art applies digital technologies from multimedia, virtual reality, computer vision and/or digital sound with digital storytelling technique in order to create aesthetical channels of communication in the form of interactive installations and digital artifacts. On one hand digital artists consider computer technology as a means of enhancing creativity, and on the other hand, as a final artifact (artistic object). Accordingly, we define here digital art as ''the art that explores the digital medium (tools, technologies and content), as a process or tool for creation, as an end-product (informative content and support) or as an artistic topic''. It is worth mentioning here that digital art has been evolving as much by the development of science and technology, as by artistic-historical influences. As a matter of fact, certain art circles continue to deny a place for computers in the world of art. In spite of this, nowadays digital technologies are becoming more and more ubiquitous and highly expressive, allowing creative people to create new aesthetical representational forms of information ; today we can hardly anticipate its full future expansion. The development of digital art is essentially founded in four central lead vectors: controlled randomness access; instruction-based algorithmic creation; presentational vir-tuality; and interaction. Controlled randomness opens up the possibilities of instant access to media elements that can be reshuffled in ostensibly infinite combinations. Instruction based algorithmic creation is related to the combination of strict rule-based processes, where the instruction is adopted as a conceptual element in the creative process. Presentational virtuality allows the shift from physical objects to the manipulation of pure concepts in the form of ''virtual objects'' that can become dynamic and volatile, …