Adaptive Artistic Technologies

Digital artists with motor impairments in their upper limbs face considerable barriers to accessibility when using drawing tools. Our work aims to investigate the complex relationship between digital artists’ creative processes and their accessibility challenges. We conducted 15 interviews with artists who use input devices to make digital art, analyzing their accessibility challenges for producing digital artwork. We reviewed how effective the solutions are in diminishing the impact on their creative processes and identifying design opportunities for the research community. Using thematic analysis, we look at the challenges participants reported in their artistic production, including managing pain, discomfort, and injuries alongside workarounds. Secondly, the artists reported the complexities of managing internal and external perceptions. Lastly, the ways creative processes are impacted by the accessibility challenges and solutions related to their upper limb motor impairments. We discuss research directions which can better address the impact of accessibility challenges on creative processes, the balance of creative agency over tools, and design insights for more accessible artistic technologies.

The advent of the digital age has given new forms and new connotations to artistic creation, and more and more digital media technologies have entered the stage of artistic creation and exhibitions. At present, holographic projection technology has become a hot application technology in the field of digital media art. The purpose of this paper is to explore the technical principles of holographic projection technology and its application in the field of digital media art, so as to provide suggestions for the application and promotion of holographic projection technology and the development and innovation of digital media art. First of all, this article understands the technical principles of holographic projection and its application status in various fields, especially in the field of digital media art, through relevant literature research. Then, this article introduces the digital holographic technology, virtual imaging technology, and computer simulation technology used in the realization of holographic projection technology. Then, based on the advantages of holographic projection technology in three‐dimensional image recording and reproduction, this paper proposes to introduce holographic projection technology to digital art museums, digital art exhibitions, and other digital media art applications and to study the effect of holographic projection technology on art through simulation experiments, the effect of recording and reproducing the image of the work. Finally, the three‐dimensional reconstruction image of the digital holographic projection experiment on the artwork is compared with the simulated image of the Contour GT profiler to verify the feasibility of applying the holographic projection technology to art exhibitions and the effect of three‐dimensional image recording and reproduction. Research shows that the holographic projection technology can achieve 93.34% of the simulation effect of recording and reproducing 3D images of artworks. It is also found that 59.86% of the audience who pay attention to the art experience strongly support the application of holographic projection technology in digital media art fields such as digital art gallery. This fully proves the feasibility of applying holographic projection technology to digital art exhibitions and provides a full range of artistic experience for audiences who cannot be present.

Integration of digital technologies in public art installations has a significant potential for the transformation of urban spaces, however many of such initiatives have failed in leaving a lasting impact. Absence of a uniform design framework for connecting the intents of the artist with the technological execution, becomes one of the key challenges. The present study endeavors to fill the identified gap with the introduction to a seven-phase design framework for guiding the execution, public value as well as the sustainability of digital art within public sphere. The study uses the case study method under the qualitative research strategy in Hangzhou, China, to conduct semi-structured interviews with digital artists and representatives from technology enterprises. The research utilizes the NVivo analytical tool for analyzing the interview data, forming the structured framework that includes Requirements Analysis, Design Conceptualization, Technical Implementation, User Experience Testing, Optimization, Implementation and Maintenance, and Post-Installation Evaluation. The framework foregrounds the vitality of interdisciplinary collaboration, technology adaptability and user-centred design. The framework shall provide practical suggestions encouraging cultural engagement, promoting inclusive form of community participation, along with encouraging social innovation and sustainability at the economic level. The findings contribute towards the policy strategies of urban culture of incorporating digital art into urban development, aligning artistic creativity with technological strength. This study offers important insights for policymakers and practitioners with the aim for harnessing digital public art for cultural revitalization and sustainable urban innovation.

International audience

From prehistoric cave paintings to contemporary digital creations, art has been integral to human expression throughout history. Digital art in modern art gradually includes various forms, such as Painting, sculpture and animation, using technology as its medium. Digital art includes any artistic work using digital technology, including Painting, 3D modelling, and interactive installations. It combines human creativity with computer technology, expanding the possibilities of creative expression. Studying digital artistry in India provides insights into cultural preservation, technological innovation, and social commentary. It promotes educational development and economic opportunities, contributing to the country's vibrant artistic scene. Technological advancements have democratized digital art creation in India, leading to diverse artistic expressions. Integrating digital art with emerging technologies like AR, VR, and NFTs opens up new possibilities for artistic exploration and dissemination. Digital art techniques include digital Painting, vector art, and 3D modelling, facilitated by hardware such as graphics tablets and software such as Adobe Creative Cloud. Brushes, textures and plugins enhance the creative process, while photo manipulation and 3D sculpting provide new avenues for artistic expression. Digital artistry in India offers insights into cultural dynamism, technological innovation and artistic development. This research paper delves into the evolving landscape of digital artistry in India, exploring various techniques, trends, and the socio-cultural impact of digital art in the country.

The fusion of digital media art with film and television animation production ushers in a new artistic and technological synergy era. This form of art, merging visual, sound, and digital innovations, faces unparalleled growth opportunities and significant challenges. This paper investigates the impact of digital media art on animation, emphasizing its influence on creative expression and production processes. Through case study analysis, we demonstrate the efficiency gains and aesthetic enhancements afforded by digital media, including a 70% reduction in rendering time and a 40% increase in character animation realism. Incorporating Virtual Reality (V.R.) and Augmented Reality (A.R.) technologies also opens up novel avenues for immersive viewer experiences. Despite facing obstacles in technology adaptation and financial investment, the application of digital media art in animation represents a crucial driver of industry evolution.

Digital art as a new trend in contemporary art practice, digital art is changing the way art is created and presented through technologies such as computer graphics and virtual reality. This article examines various ways of displaying the digital art, aesthetic concepts of digital art and its key role in protecting the traditional culture, and pays special attention to the development of Chinese digital art in our time. An analysis of how Chinese artists use digital technologies for innovative artistic practices, and how these practices reflect and influence modern Chinese society and culture. The research includes an analysis of the main technologies and examples of combining art and technology, as well as an assessment of the role of digital tools in the creative process. Special attention was paid to digital art, its innovativeness, freedom of expression and new horizons of interactivity and accessibility. This confirms that digital art, as an evolving art form, not only enriches the content and expands the scope of art, but also opens up endless opportunities for the future development of art. This convergence not only revives traditional culture on digital platforms, but also contributes to the preservation of culture through innovative ways that allow works of art to interact with a wide audience in new forms.

As digital art merges with contemporary art, there have been many fundamental changes in the creative process. New forms of art continue to emerge and a revolutionary change in the art experience is occurring in museums, galleries and on the Internet. As a digital art curator, I have been fortunate to be a part of this revolution and will share my experiences and thoughts about past, present and future developments in curating traditional, contemporary and digital art. After a few landmark exhibitions in the late 1960s, digital art found an early home in international organisations, such as Ars Electronica, ISEA, New York Digital Salon, and ZKM. The development of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s gave digital art the additional exposure it needed. Artists could now sidestep the traditional art establishment and reach a global audience through their websites. The Internet also expanded the art experience beyond galleries and museums into homes, schools and portable devices. 2001 joined 1968 as a landmark year for major museum exposure of digital art with BitStreams and Data Dynamics at the Whitney Museum of American Art and 010101 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. What transpired over these decades has reshaped contemporary art and presented new challenges to museum professionals faced with this new art form. When looking towards the future, we will see a continued merging of digital art with contemporary art. New ways of exhibiting and creative self-expression using VR and Augmented Reality, along with other new, yet to be invented, technologies will be developed as they continue to infuse our daily lives and art experiences. This paper will examine the evolution of curating digital art over the past twenty-five years.

NFTs and Digital Art

Sloppy selection: Providing an accurate interpretation of imprecise selection gestures

A natural game interaction method can bring a good game experience to users, but pen-type interaction, which is one of the natural human-computer interaction methods, rarely appears in games, especially three-dimensional games. The main reason is that most pen-type interactive devices are developed for two-dimensional applications such as writing and painting. Whether the pen-based interaction can be extended from two-dimensional to three-dimensional is the key to whether the pen-based interaction can become one of the leading interactive methods of the game. The pen tablet is one of the most widely used pen-type interactive devices, and a virtual tour is an essential part of the game. Therefore, this paper takes this as a breakthrough and proposes a virtual roaming control method based on the pen tablet. First, we analyze the performance characteristics of the pen tablet and get the data information available for the pen tablet. Then, we design various virtual roaming actions such as walking, running, jumping, viewing angle rotation, view zooming, space-free displacement, acceleration, and deceleration and establish an association with the operation of the pen tablet. At the same time, the maximum likelihood function constraint was added to improve the error tolerance rate of viewing angle rotation. Finally, two games were developed to verify their effectiveness. The experimental results show that the pen tablet performs well in completing virtual roaming tasks, especially when users need to achieve similar writing and roaming tasks without switching devices back and forth. This maintains the user’s habit of writing with pen and paper and improves the interactive experience. The method is a new exploration of the application of pen-based interaction in games, which lays the foundation for future game development based on pen-based interaction.

The chapter draws on the writings of Merleau-Ponty constituting an Embodiment Theory of Art, which he uses to support his embodiment theory of perception (Haworth JT, The embodiment theory of pre-reflexive thought and creativity. In: Gilhooly KJ, Keane MTG, Logie RH, Erdos G (eds) Lines of thinking, vol 2. Wiley, Chichester, 1990, Leonardo 30(2):137–145, 1997). This views the artwork as “enriched being” in its own right, as distinct from an analogue for an external truth or essence, as traditional aesthetic theory claims. It proposes that this enriched being is not produced primarily by intentional acts, the traditional view, but by the reciprocal influence of consciousness, the body, techniques and materials. It “gives visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible” (Merleau-Ponty M, Eye and mind. In: Eddie JM (ed) The primacy of perception. North Western University Press, Evanston, p 166, 1964a). Merleau-Ponty (Eye and mind. In: Eddie JM (ed) The primacy of perception. North Western University Press, Evanston, 1964a) drew on the writings of modern artists and concluded that the painter’s vision is not a view on the outside, but a concentration or coming to itself of the visible (p. 181). He considered that works of art contain matrices of ideas that have their origins in embodiment (Merleau-Pony M, Indirect language and the voices of silence. In Wild J (ed) Signs. North Western University Press, Evanston, p 77, 1964b). He also claimed “that modes of thought correspond to technical methods, and that to use Goethe’s phrase ‘what is inside is also outside’” (Sense and Nonsense 1964c, p 59). As Merleau-Ponty indicates, we do not see the world, but see with the world. In artistic terms different media with which we interact have different voices which play a part in the creation of enriched being, perception and consciousness. The chapter will present conclusions from research conversations undertaken by Haworth (Leonardo 30(2):137–145, 1997) using the perspectives of Merleau-Ponty, held with internationally famous artists in order to gain further insights into the creative process. The chapter will summarise and discuss findings from practice led research by the author, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board in the UK, into Creativity and Embodied Mind in Digital Fine Art; and Freedom and Constraints in the Creative Process (Haworth JT, Explorations in creativity, technology and embodied mind. In: Freire T (ed) Understanding positive life: research and practice on positive psychology. Escolar Editora, Lisboa, pp 429–444, 2010a). Several examples of recent work in digital fine art by the author will be presented and discussed, focusing on the creative process. Comments will be noted from an international study of digital artists (Thompson P, Born digital-new materialities. Robert Gordon University, Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, 2011). The chapter will summarise and discuss an innovative photoethnographic project by the author into ‘The Way We Are Now’, and ‘A day in the life of----’. The possibilities of interpretation of this visual methodology are considered to be “an artistic object for contemplation; as individual visual profiles for comparative research; or as analysis of themes across a group of individuals, and between groups” (Haworth JT, Explorations in creativity, technology and embodied mind. In: Freire T (ed) Understanding positive life: research and practice on positive psychology. Escolar Editora, Lisboa, pp 429–444, 2010a). The ESM method with photos can also stimulate reflection and change in perceptions. The method can break the mould of looking/ perceiving. It can open up opportunities/possibilities for new ways of seeing things, and introduce a new train of imagination. The method could be used to create a global mirror of consciousness. The chapter will conclude by discussing future directions for research and practice.

The advent of the Internet era has endowed artistic creation with new forms and connotations, and more and more digital media technologies have entered the stage of artistic creation and exhibition. At the same time, Internet technology has also provided more abundant artistic resources and art forms for digital media art for reference. With the development of animation control technology, various character animations present three-dimensional visual effects. Digital media art has emerged as a new concept in the field of multimedia applications and the integration and development of various technologies such as intelligent technology, network technology, media technology, and art design. This makes the art present a three-dimensional beauty with the support of modern high-tech technology. This paper mainly discusses the application of animation control technology in digital media art under the support of Internet technology. This paper also studies the artistic effect of digital media art under animation control technology. Through experimental research, this paper shows that the application of animation control technology in digital media art can improve the vividness of animation characters and promote the integration of digital media technology and culture and art. The fidelity to its simulated reality reaches 98.99%, and the actual effect achieved in the process of digital media art design work is completed, thereby realizing a large number of character animation scenes.

The application of artificial intelligence to creative processes has profoundly changed the modern digital art and illustration processes. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are among many other AI approaches that have become potent in creating quality visual art and assisting the exploration of art. In this paper, the author explores the use of GANs as a creative collaborator in the digital painting and illustration workflow. The paper analyzes the technical principles behind GAN architectures, their use in the artistic image generation, and their role in human-AI creative processes. The most important applications of GAN systems, such as concept generation, style transfer, image-to-image translation, and automated colorization, are examined in order to comprehend how the technologies can support an artist at any phase of visual creation. The examples of major GAN models DCGAN, CycleGAN, StyleGAN, and StyleGAN2 are also compared to discuss the effectiveness of these models in the synthesis of artistic images. According to the results provided, it is seen that advanced architectures are better in image realism, consistency of structures and artistic usability than the previous models. Moreover, the study demonstrates the advantages of GAN-based tools as it promotes quick ideation, experimentation with styles, and design feedback, without taking control of the creative process of artists. The paper also talks of the technical structures of integrating GAN systems in the digital art setting and talks about issues of ethical issues surrounding authorship, originality, and bias in the dataset. All in all, the results indicate that the technologies based on GAN redefine the production of digital art by facilitating the interactive collaboration between human creativity and machine intelligence and creating new opportunities in the realm of innovations in computational creativity and digital illustration practice.

Since Wallas (1926), the description of the stages of the creative process concerned creativity in general, including art, science, design or music. But what about differences in the creative process between different fields of endeavor? The objectives of this chapter are to describe creative processes respecting an ecological approach by observing the process in its natural context. Analyses of the transitions between process stages, by domain and across domains, show specific patterns underlying creative work. In this chapter, a new vision of the creative process across fields is offered. Issues of process-related domain specificity are discussed.