-
Period: to
Intro
Digital art is any art created or edited using technology, like computers, tablets, or drawing software. It started in the 1950s and has grown into a huge part of how people create and share artwork today -
Early Digital Art- Ben Laposky’s Oscilloscope Art
Ben Laposky, an American mathematician, created abstract drawings by tweaking an electronic oscilloscope (a device for viewing waveforms) and photographing the screen. His 1952 piece Oscillon 40 is often brought up as one of the very first computer-generated artworks -
Sketchpad
In 1963, Ivan Sutherland developed Sketchpad, a computer program where people could draw directly on a screen with a light pen. It was a breakthrough in computer graphics that proved computers could be used to create and manipulate images -
First Public Computer Art Exhibitions
1965 saw some of the first gallery shows of computer-generated art. In Stuttgart, Germany, Georg Nees and Frieder Nake held the Computergrafik exhibition in February 1965. That same year in New York, Bell Labs scientists Michael Noll and Béla Julesz presented a show of computer-created images. -
Cybernetic Serendipity Exhibition
The 1968 Cybernetic Serendipity show in London showcased art made with computers, robots, and electronic systems. It featured computer-generated music, poetry, animations and interactive pieces -
AARON
Artist Harold Cohen created AARON, one of the earliest AI art programs. In 1972 he exhibited drawings made by AARON at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art -
Period: to
AARON’s Continued Evolution
By 1974, Cohen had refined AARON into a more advanced system. That year he demonstrated new AARON prints, making it clear that this computer program could produce original abstract artworks on its own -
MacPaint and Desktop Graphics
Apple released MacPaint in 1984 alongside the first Macintosh computer.
MacPaint was a simple drawing program that let people create on-screen art with a mouse. -
Adobe Photoshop Launched
In 1990, Adobe released Photoshop 1.0 for Macintosh computers. Photoshop quickly became the standard tool for editing and creating images. It lets artists and photographers do things digitally like retouching photos or compositing images that were harder before. -
The Web and Net Art
The early 1990s saw the spread of the World Wide Web to the public. With web browsers, artists began making net art creative web pages and simple online graphics. The internet gave digital artists a global canvas and community for the first time. -
Launch of DeviantArt
In 2000, DeviantArt.com went online as a community gallery for artists. It quickly became a gathering place where digital creators worldwide could post and share drawings, paintings, 3D art and animations. -
Procreate Launches for iPad
Procreate was released in 2011 and gave artists a way to create digital art on a tablet. By 2016, it became one of the top ten best-selling iPad apps, and in 2018, it was the #1 best-selling iPad app overall. -
First NFT
Kevin McCoy created Quantum in 2014, which is often called the first NFT (non-fungible token) artwork. Quantum was a simple digital animation marked on a blockchain to prove its ownership. -
CryptoPunks and NFT Boom
A project called CryptoPunks launched in June 2017.
It consisted of 10,000 unique pixel-art avatars stored on the Ethereum blockchain. CryptoPunks are now famous as some of the earliest NFT artworks and helped spark the crypto-art boom of 2021 -
“Edmond de Belamy” Sells at Auction
An AI-generated portrait titled “Edmond de Belamy” sold at Christie’s auction in 2018 for $432,500. This was the first time a major auction house sold a piece of art made by artificial intelligence -
AI Images and Record NFT Sale
In January 2021, OpenAI introduced DALL·E, an AI that creates images from text prompts. Later that year, digital artist Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) sold his NFT collage “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” at Christie’s for $69 million