Digital Art Research Team

The DART website is now live (www.digitalartresearchteam.com). This is an exciting project that I’ve been working on for the past year with three others from my MA Art and Science course. We started out as a group of painters who loved chatting about all things do with with painting and printmaking. However, as the pandemic developed we soon realised that we missed the interactions that you get from painting in a shared studio space and we were hungry to see if we could come up a virtual way of working that still allowed for lots of interaction and experimentation.

We decided to take it in turns to start a digital painting and then pass it to someone else to alter/add/destroy/improve/change in some way. There were very few rules apart from the order in which we would tackle each painting.

It has been an interesting experiment in taking on different roles in the artistic process (author, audience, participator, collaborator, curator) as the paintings were passed from person to person. But this initial experiment ended up taking us someplace much further.

We started questioning new ways of working in the digital art market. Could our process be scaled? How could more artists be involved? What is the value of a digital painting? Is it the painting or the process? How could we create new ways of digital collaboration?

We don’t have answers to all these questions but we are united in our quest to see how audience interaction and participation can be used to create new works of art in the digital realm. Our ultimate aim is to build a platform that turns the tables on what it is to be an artist, audience and participator. You can follow our progress on our website and also see the first 100 of our collaborative paintings that sparked this whole idea.