The New Transmediality — Transformations in Digital Art

The course will give an overview of the current state and latest developments in digital art, with a focus on the changes that the recent wave of AI tools and the NFT and Web3 trend have brought to an understanding of digital art. The discussions of today’s digital art practices will be grounded in a survey of their evolution throughout the decades. Both today’s AI art practice and NFTs have brought about new qualities in the understanding of the digital medium, which can be described as a “transmediality” that crosses and merges medium-specific characteristics. Among these transmedial qualities are instabilities of the boundaries between media such as digital art, photography, and painting; the renegotiation of boundaries between text and image; the effects of AI’s “pre-trained transformation”; as well as the fusion of art and market mechanisms. Through case studies and readings, students will engage with the challenges and possibilities of digital technologies as an art medium.

June 6 | 14:00 -17:30

• - Introduction to course topics
• - Digital art history: practices throughout the decades

June 7 | 14:00 -17:30

• - Histories of AI art
• - AI as medium – LLMs, Generative Pre-Trained Transformers, and text-image-models

June 8 | 14:00 -18:00

• - From Web1 to Web3
• - Blockchain as medium

• Active participation and attendance (quantity & quality): 85%
• Brief in-class presentation: 15%