I'm lucky enough to be a member of Tate and I get periodical magazines that talk about Modern Art all the time. My question is where are all the really modern artists? The digital art I've seen springs largely out of the commercial world where practitioners are paid to learn their skills for companies. Often then these people branch into digital art but I've always found it has a whiff of commercial.

Do pure digital artists exist? Ones that trained as fine artists? If they do why are they not being represented by galleries supposedly representing "Modern" art? When will there be whole galleries in Tate with digital screens instead of frames?

Arguably yes. However, it largely depends on how you define 'digital', and 'art', and 'digital art'.

Digital is quite wide these days, so is 'art'. Is film part of that? Would, for example, Greenaway (trained in FA) fit in your definition? What about David Carson?

And, if yes, are galeries appropriate curators for such work; are galleries – an invention of previous centuries when art itself was different – appropriate curators for art in general in the contemporary context.

Ha Anton, I knew you bite :-)

I don't think film is part of this, nor sound. I'm thinking of art that is, at it's basest level, built from pixels.

In a lot of ways everyone's screen (home / work / mobile) is real place for this type of work to be seen, but that feels to general for me.

It feels like what's missing is a 'place' in which we consume digital art in the same way we do traditional galleries. People like the Tate should be on the fore-front of this. Imagine an empty room (or series of rooms) in the Tate Modern where you walked around with iPads and the work came to your device as you came nearby. It might add a nice aspect of discovery to the work itself?

You wouldn't have to push and shove to squint at tiny info panels!

You know me too well :).

Digital requires tech which is ubiquous and hence space agnostic. To place it in a venue would be to skew the scope, to place it in a gallery would be to narrow that scope further.

My point is that hosting digArt in a gallery is doable and absolutely fine. However, it imposes a physical constraint unrelated to the actual nature of the discipline, which can bring about some amazing and engaging work, no doubt, but despite its possible usefulness equally limits the full potential of the discipline, methinks.

Btw, Greenway did a VJ gig sometime ago – so kind of fits your definition too ;) – m.youtube.com

Sidenote: if you read the Tate's acquisition policy (tate.org.uk) it does talk of 'Net Art'.

"Tate commissions Net Art for its website and also seeks to acquire works of art that use networked or non-networked digital technologies for creation, presentation and distribution, or that critique or comment on the same digital technologies"

I am a current student of digital art, mainly video but also digital-based installation, and I feel that there is a lot of growth in art education in the digital field. The departments for time-based media (installation, film, video art) in art academies in Europe and USA are growing bigger and bigger. That's why I think that digital art does not grow out of the commercial world any more. The digital media departments teach digital art with the same criteria as any other type of art.

I can say for myself (but I hope applies more generally) that I have never learnt any readily commercial methods in my video art education and my schooling has never made any references to tv or music videos (that I guess are closest to digital fine art).

Digital work (potentially) transcends traditional boundaries of art, design, science, technology, products, performance, events… I'm aware this sounds flaky (hopefully I'll be forgiven), but digital romanticism aside, if focus is on work and not on the traditional boundaries, curation becomes a part of the project brief. True?

Computation, Communication, Aesthetics – xcoax.org