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Can all art be reduced to a digital format - zeros and ones? The first art - the first visual art - existed solely in the wet wiring of the brain. It consisted of images fixed therein through sensory experience. They were images of objects associated with food, water, beasts that could kill, or potential mates. It was not yet art that used words. They were the type of images a cat or dog sees, and remembers, and to which they react without the benefit of vocabulary and language. Then early humans created links, within the brain, between these mental images; the objects they represented; and sounds they could create within themselves; or with physical artifacts, marked by dragging a stick, stained by smearing clay or berries or blood across their surface, or incised with a sharp edge of broken stone. Humans have been using physical media since - and progress is measured by the expanding tools and materials that can be used for creating and disseminating the images. Yet fundamentally, these new objects (whether created through painting, weaving, sculpture, printing, photography or some other process) were mere devices for projecting images onto the brain. There are now new ways to project those images. The fact that the images are represented by zeros and ones in one step in the process is of no greater consequence, cognitively, than the fact that a paint brush consists of a multitude of bristles. What changes in all of this are not the images affixed within the brain, but rather, the methods by which they are created, transported over long distance, stored compactly, efficiently distributed to all humans on earth and projected - still through the eyes and ears - to the brain. The art, ultimately, remains in the brain. |