Neurons are cells specialized for voltage changes. Ion currents flow through cell membranes. Dendrites pick up excitation from other cells. In the axon hillock, analog signals are transcoded into digital signals ... Our nervous system is based on impulses, excitation transfers and signal processing. If the voltage flows in the wrong place at the wrong time, we go crazy. If it fails, we are brain dead. We are electric. ///

Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message.” Tool and medium shape image idea, execution and signal. Drawings, paintings and sculptures have been transmitting codes for millennia. Digital art, on the other hand, is already based on electrical coding in the process of creation. You can’t paint digital art ‘in oil’. The images are volatile; pixels replace pigments. Without electricity, no image can be created in the first place. But with digital tools, electrical voltage can be transformed into exciting visual worlds. Digital art is electric. ///

Pythagoras thought light was emitted by hot visual rays from the eyes. Physical experiments did not prove the connections between the electromagnetic rays that reach our optic nerves until much later. Quantum physics discovered the current of photons, again later the rules of electrodynamics were understood. So, as a photographer, you ‘paint’ with ‘electric light particles’ and ‘image electromagnetic waves’. ///

Across all image media, art connects ideas with people. Art encodes and excites via impulses and signals - analog and digital. The word parallels are interesting: ‘tension’, ‘excitement’, ‘code’, ‘impulse', ‘current’ and ‘signal’ are also key words within image design. ///

h:h:m:h creates digital image worlds.

The wristwatch replaces an app on the smartphone. Instead of looking out the window, we trust the weather app. Webcams bring our vacation spots home in advance. We no longer write on paper as often with a ballpoint pen, but with our thumbs on the smartphone – with limbs that have evolved to grasp. With online services, we shop conveniently around the clock all over the world. Doctor’s appointments are made online, and remote diagnosis is also becoming increasingly common. We initiate our next love affair online. Entertainment, customer advice, wayfinding – all digital. Talking jukeboxes search for information on weekend events in the region for us on demand. Our room can become a cyber living space with VR glasses: Our bodies continue to reside between cemented walls, but in our minds we can already traverse boundless dimensions. Our children drive virtual car races in digital landscapes. Five-year-olds run through the streets, staring spellbound at the screens of their smartphones; oblivious, fascinated and absorbed in parallel worlds. It seems as if they are literally being pulled into the virtual spaces.

Virtual space is creating a social paradigm shift, and we are right in the middle of it. Every day, we move around in virtual parallel worlds as a matter of course, at work and at home – even without 3D glasses. These worlds are just as real as the rooms in our homes. We can do business, have fun or commit crimes in them. We make contact with other people and connect with them - just like in ‘real’ life. They have long been an integral part of our lives.

There can be no purely virtual life as long as we are bound to a body. But the boundaries of virtuality are shifting. Already today, bedridden patients have relationships with people on other continents whom they know only as avatars and will never meet in person. They seek comfort in virtual relationships.

New production conditions are the end of the classic industrial society. We no longer live in the age of production, but in the age of information. Knowledge has always been power – now data has become a commodity. Because these developments are gradual, we are rarely aware of them. Every day, resourceful entrepreneurs come up with new ideas to further streamline processes. Manufacturers are digitally reinventing themselves and every single production step.

The industry is talking about ‘digital twins’, ‘Internet of Thinks’, ‘cloud computing’, ‘artificial intelligence’ and ‘user experience’. ‘Position tracking’ calculates the body features of dead actors onto the moving, virtual 3D bones of real filmed extras; a third, virtual ‘being’ is calculated from a dead and a living person. International flows of goods flow into virtual simulations for efficiency testing. Products and services are planned, produced and distributed on a virtual level. VR goggles mirror components into space for the engineer to reach through. Teams from different parts of the world meet after lunch via video conference for an update. Marketing? Virtual bidding on click rates. Virtual reality has long since become reality. We live a mixed life of real and virtual experiences. Our life is hybrid! We are ‘pre-virtuals’!

When our actions are digitalized, our experiences will also be virtual. Will we at some point forget the analogue ways of dealing and living? Will our hands, arms, and trunks atrophy along with our manual skills? Don’t we already look different, rounder and more curved today because of our hours of virtual activity in front of the ‘TVs’? Do our physical experiences evaporate? Are we leaving the analogue world? Will we find our way back to the analogue world once we have left it or will we then remain trapped in the apparent authenticity of virtuality. In the end, will only the real basic needs remain for the analogue life? Shall we?

In the man-made era of the Anthropocene we are experiencing a parallel revolution. We are crossing the boundaries of analogue life with great strides towards a symbiosis of analogue and virtual existence. The process is continuous and creeping - we therefore usually do not consciously perceive the effects on our lives. In art, too, analog boundaries dissolve and our existence between physical and virtual realities is increasingly being addressed.

In the book “Was gibt’s zu sehen, 150 Jahre Moderne Kunst” from Will Gompertz² the timeline of art epochs following postmodernism, minimal art, concept and performance art ends with the names of the current artist stars. »Kunst heute« (Art Today) is the end of the time travel through the exciting art history of modernism.

Isn’t there something missing?

In its origins, media art was linked to photographic and film techniques. It uses media technologies such as film, video, television and computer as ‘image carriers’ instead of canvas and sculpture. The generic term ‘media art’ with its subdivisions into ‘digital art’, ‘video art’, ‘computer art’, ‘robot art’ etc. thus refers to the media and tools used. The art genres of ‘Conceptual Art’, ‘Processual Art’, ‘Generative Art’, ‘Interactive Art’, ‘Performative Art’, ‘Net Art’, ‘Game Art’ etc. overlap and connect in places with media art. Works of art that are realized with the tools of virtual reality are also referred to as ‘VR art’ by a generic term. It also describes the medium.

The drastic changes brought about by digital and virtual processes are not about another category for a new art genre, but about the description of an epoch!

Artists will increasingly deal with virtual themes. New digital processes will further change the production of art. The proposed name ‘Virtual Art’ for the present epoch reflects the upheaval in our time. It is not about genres or painting styles, but about a new form of existence.

What’s next? What will become of fine art in a virtual world? Will virtual artists present virtual artworks in virtual museums?

Philip Rosedale, founder of ‘Second Life’, it looks forward to it: »In einigen Jahren werden wir die reale Welt als Museum betrachten«. (Analogous translation: In a few years we’ll look at the real world as a museum.)³

Why the art world’s constant and devout bowing to pictorial themes that centuries ago moved the elites of the nobility and the Church? Were they deprived of view of commissioned art, which today is kept in safes for the longest time? In front of pictures that have mutated into objects of trade and prestige whose astronomical prices are artificially inflated? ///

What does a painting that basically copies or varies old ideas want to tell us today? What do variants of Minimal Art have to tell us that is new, apart from asking questions to specialized art critics? Where are innovative forms of presentation in the temples of art museums? Who is still captivated by the ritual of vernissages with opening speeches full of empty words and small talk with champagne glasses in front of white gallery walls? What is the point of the filtered, iconographic decoding of image details by museum educators who sell their view of “groundbreaking works” and thus rob the pictures of their aura? Why do we walk like lemmings through boring exhibitions in the stink of the Sunday visitor queues? ///

We need more, new, previously undiscovered art and creative forms of presentation. We need the opening and financial appreciation for fresh, unknown art and artists. There is a lack of courageous, contemporary and questioning art in museums instead of the constant mystification of the painter with the cut off ear and the endless reproduction of the tomato soup cans. ///

Outside the museum door we read about plastic particles in pack ice belts, melting glaciers, extinction of species, migration, diesel scandal, care crisis, freedom of opinion, world food, hate messages, lie press, wars ... but inside the museum the same pattern is repeated without any emotion: “important collections” show “important artists” from the ‘drawers’ Bauhaus, Expressionism, Impressionism, Art Nouveau, Constructivism, Surrealism, etc. The thoraxes of the trained visitors swell when they are able to recite the right art epochs - as in a vocabulary test. Art reception should look different. ///

There are exciting artists who go beyond familiar boundaries of perception. Many of these creatives create excellent works, are at the same time unknown and live below the subsistence level! There are exhibitions of contemporary art that are excitingly staged. There are alternative presentation formats and discussions about voluntarily refraining from intercontinental museum visits. But the relationship of new art platforms to established rituals does not fit. The budgets for urban prestige new buildings are disproportionately high. The Sunday cultural visits to the sacred halls of the museums have an artificial effect. The clientele of collectors and customers of galleries and auction houses with their merchandise art is circumscribed. The relevance of art in people’s everyday lives is not right, partly because of a lack of credibility with the art scene. Modern and abstract art has a problem of trust and thus an image problem. ///

Art should be more integrated into our everyday life, not only in the form of a bronze sculpture on the square in front of the town hall. We should surround ourselves with art, always and quite naturally. In the street scene, in parks, in front of and behind the front door. Art should be as omnipresent as no parking signs. Much more art fits into our commonplaces. For a better quality of life and a higher level of culture. ///