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Meticulous emergence of the Internet has become the foundation of this digitized age. According to a report published by the Internet and Mobile Association of India on September 2019, India houses 12% of the total internet using population around the world. It comes second after China followed by the USA. The Indian art market is so affected by it that you may now buy paintings online and sell them too.

The inexorable development of the internet has embedded it in every facet of our art world. The consequence of the convolution of IT into art is that the market of Indian paintings is reaching new zeniths of profitability. The contemporary art and traditional art, both have been benefitted from the endeavors of some IT prodigy and art enthusiasts. 

Internet facilitates the promotion of paintings online

In a country where art was considered a luxury, the internet introduced art to middle-class households. Auctioning sites and online galleries aided the perusal of work of art through the comfort of our homes. The world wide web also helped Indian art to gain acknowledgement and recognition on the international platforms.

Anuradha Mazumdar has worked with Sotheby’s in New York which is one of the most famous and credible art auction houses. She is a contemporary critic of Indian paintings. According to her,” Indian contemporary art is emerging as the fastest-growing category in Asian art.”

Also Read: Types of Indian Paintings: An pulchritudinous Journey

The appreciation of our indigenous art influenced the cultural and artistic dynamism of the Asia-pacific region. The mist of biased orientalism is clearing the minds of the west for them, to see the true potential and beauty of the art of the Asian continent.

Similarly, Japanese, Indonesian, and Korean art were at the center stage of the art world because of the promotion of their art through the internet. After some time, with the advent of new inventions in technology, digital art came into being. Artists combined their artistic creation with tech to create good work.

Indians have proved their potential in the tech field. Their imagination coupled with their technical knowledge has created seamless opportunities for them as digital artists in India and overseas. The western entertainment industry is replete with examples of outsourcing their services in India related to this genre as best digital artists of the world are amongst Indians.

The Knock of AI into digital art

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Algorithms have been developed by computer scientists that could create paintings on their own. The best example of this is the ‘Portrait of Edmund Belamy’ that was created by an AI algorithm. This artwork fetched $432,500 at an auction organized by Christie’s exclusively for works developed by AI.

Three artists, Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel, and Gauthier Vernier, based out of Paris fed thousands of paintings and artwork into the algorithm through machine learning and taught about the aesthetic rules and principles of art.

Initially, a program named AARON was coded by Harold Cohen in 1973 which was a breakthrough in the world of art. The machine created sketches and drawings according to the instructions of the artist. The prints of these are readily available if you want to buy paintings online. The machine was in its crude form and had no autonomy as is observed in the algorithms driven by AI today.

Contemporary artwork that is generated by the AI today is the outcome of using a special kind of algorithm known as GAN or Generative Adversarial Network. It was generated for the first time by the eminent computer scientist Ian Goodfellow in the year 2014. They use the term adversarial because there are two types of systems that work side by side in them. One is being taught or fed images of art by artists and the other autonomously produce images. The generated one is put to test by the other one to match or align it with the images that are fed.

According to Psychologist Daniel E. Berlyne, a work of art is a mixture of novel ideas, wonder, intricacy, mysticism and eclecticism. This observation I the result of decades of hard work in the field of psychology of aesthetics.

He tries to defend the artwork made by GAN through these elements. He can see the novelty in the deformed faces of the portraits created by the AI tool. They resemble the oeuvres of abstract artists Francis Bacon. One of his famous artwork is the ‘Three Studies for a portrait of Henrietta Moraes’. But, the faces of these paintings were meant to be deformed. The figurines were ‘intentionally’ left deformed to convey a meaning.

So, AI-generated portraits lack the motive and purpose behind an artwork. We can infer that the intent of the machine was to make a human face which it failed to achieve.

The Onset of New Media Art

New Media Art is often looked down upon by traditional painters for being ‘Ready-made’. They are of the view that this digitized artform doesn’t carry the originality of the creative mind. Conventional artforms require manual labour to be performed on the canvas that requires skill acquired through years of hard work and dedication.

If we try to look at this new form of art through the glass of traditional art forms, it would be like looking a 3D movie in the bioscope. According to Professor Duchamp, New Media Defies the scope of having a medium. It doesn’t contain the limitations of the media. When two mediums are to be used on the canvas, their compatibility and effect are observed. New media need not worry about that. we can’t confine or identify it with any other medium available to date.

It is a virtual platform for breaking the shackles of concrete realism and realizing an expression beyond reality. But, the argument that new media art doesn’t provide a way to realize the artistic expectations is not well-founded as inspiration is taken from the elements of conventional mediums that are being fed. Initially, the varying outcomes reflected by the existing mediums are virtually documented to create it.

Thus, IT and IoT have transformed the permutations and combinations of the art world.