Technological advances have helped transform the practices of artists.
The artists of the modern Information Age have a wider audience than ever before, and the tools offered by the rapid advances of information technologies will allow them to explore as well as create new forms of artistic expression. Computers have enabled artists to experiment with interactivity and multimedia just as the re-discovered knowledge of the Renaissance enabled DaVinci to experiment with pastel and mural preparation. There are many historical similarities between the emergence of art in our modern times and the emergence of new forms of art in previous eras. When photography was first introduced, artists tried to force their old ways of thought onto the new medium. They saw photography as "drawing with light" and applied principles of painting to photography. It took many years for artists to learn the new language of photography, which was very different from the old language of painting. The artists of today are making the first hesitant steps into this new era, and their experiments have met with varying degrees of success and failure. .
Thee combination of art and technology is not new. The cross disciplinary work of Leonardo da Vinci, and the mechanically engineered spectacles of Renaissance and Baroque culture are useful early examples of art and advanced technology. Art and technological ideas did not depart until the Industrial Revolution, when artists began to refuse the values of an urbanized society, authorship and the natural world. The resulting split widened so significantly that when, a century later, Marinetti published his Futurist Manifesto in 1909, offering the production of art and machine to revitalize society.
Technological advances have made art available to more people throughout history. The printing press, radio, and television became accessible to a wider audience, and the Internet seems to be the natural next step in this progression of art-distribution technologies.
