Kelomees examines art in the digital age in new book

ERR reports that art historian, artist and Pallas media design professor Raivo Kelomees has published Contemporary Art in the Digital Age in the Publications series of the Pallas Higher School of Art.

The book examines the development of digital and technological art from the early 1990s to the present, while also exploring how digitalisation has changed perceptions of the artist, the artwork, the viewer and artistic activity more broadly.

Kelomees argues that digital technology is no longer a separate field of art but has become embedded in a wide range of artistic practices, from painting and photography to installation art, performance art and bioart. The book therefore treats digital art not as an isolated phenomenon but as part of the broader transformation of contemporary art.

The book is organised around six concepts: authorship, talent, hybridity, interactivity, criticality and alternativity. Through these themes, it examines algorithmic and generative art, virtual and interactive environments, biosensor-based artistic practices, net art, artificial intelligence and the relationship between art and technology.

“An artwork that is a technical assemblage responding to the viewer’s behaviour in real time becomes, through interaction with the viewer, a physical-performative unit,” Kelomees writes.

The book’s historical perspective extends beyond the 1990s. It connects the development of digital art with earlier practices in cybernetic, electronic, systems and participatory art, and looks for predecessors of digital visual technologies in more distant art history.

This places Estonian digital art within an international history of development. According to Kelomees, the 1990s marked the first time that art in Estonia operated in synchrony with Western art.

The book began with a paradox. While writing it, Kelomees felt that “digital art had come full circle and the novelty of its technologies and themes had been exhausted”. Today, however, that has become a new question: if all art has been permeated by digitalisation, it is no longer enough to ask what digital art is. The question is what art is in the digital age.