what i did and said

At the Brooklyn Museum, up until the middle of July, is a show that is decidedly not digital (sans a single video piece). The artist Takashi Murakami’s high color-key paintings and sculptures are inspired and influenced by Japanese manga and video games like Katamari-Damacy. To quote the review that appeared in The New York Times a couple of weeks ago, Mr. Murakami's work asks "questions of art and commerce, high and low, public brand and private expression, mass production and exquisite craft."
What makes this work interesting in the larger conversation about digital art and how it relates to culture today is that Murakami is standing in the gap between more traditional media and works that are being made using the most cutting edge technologies. By doing this he is asking some of the same questions that new media artists are asking, yet by using more traditional mediums he does not have to overcome the barriers of entry for the viewer that many new media artists have to deal with. Murakami is just one of a number of artists who are being inspired by technology and finding it fruitful to explore themes and issues that are becoming more and more relevant to society using more traditional techniques.
Valery Grancher’s exists between the traditional and the digital by bringing the icons of the computer world onto canvases. She does this by slowing down the process of making the icon, thereby asking the viewer to look at it as more than a placeholder on a screen, but also as a cultural object. However, because of the inherent clinical quality of the images she chooses to depict, Grancher’s paintings seem to stop short of asking us to examine these in any real critical context.
Another more nuanced way of examining the crossover of the digital and analog worlds, is created by the art collective made up of Eva and Franco Mattes. Their series of prints, the 13 Most Beautiful Avatars (from Second Life), offer a view into the digital world from the analog perspective that sheds light on both realms. By creating “portraits” of a set avatars and hanging them in a real world gallery (as well as being displayed in a Second Life gallery) they are presenting the viewer with a whole chorus of questions about the aesthetics of beauty (as well as questions about synthetic beauty), the personhood of avatars, authorship of artworks (they did not create the avatars, they simply made a “screenshot” of them) and the list goes on.
A third artist who is standing in the gap of the traditional and digital artwork is Casey Reas. Known as a groundbreaking digital artist, the prints and objects that he produces as evidence of the software pieces he creates act almost as archeological remains from some other reality.
What these artists are showing us, either intentionally or not, is what digital art needs to become fully understood: the knowledge that the methods of consuming and appreciating new media works are different from traditional media.
The new media artist has to completely rethink the relationship between the work and the viewer. A traditional painting is viewed and interacted with completely differently than a totally immersive environment, or a telematically controlled piece of software or a virtual game-type piece. The new media artist has to re-teach the audience that it can be more than just the audience. That participation, interaction, and applied thought are necessary to complete the works. New media pieces are coming from a different aesthetic reality, one where motion and interaction and participation are essential.
The artists mentioned above are reaching out via traditional methods, leading viewers towards a different art aesthetic. As digital art and new media works become more prevalent, the newness of the digital medium will wear off and audiences capable of switching between the two types of art will develop, creating a rich dialogue between virtual realities and more concrete ones.