Digital Media and Contemporary Art

Digital media are today in a state of transition: on the one hand, they look towards the past, showing their ability to recover and give new functions to all the wealth of knowledge deposited on analogic media; on the other hand, towards the future, developing completely new forms, which are based on characteristics that analogic media did not possess: modularity, variability, programmability, interactivity. The purpose of this paper is therefore to give a quick overview of how digital media are offering a new conceptual and operational scenario, reconfiguring on the one hand the expectations of individuals and institutions about digital tools, and on the other offering the artists new opportunities to elaborate their expressiveness and experimental creativity.