Task 1.1 - Critical Report

2D Art has many workflows, such as painting, sketching, collage, printmaking and photography, to name a few.

Painting is the act of applying paint, pigments or any other form of coloured medium to a solid surface, usually aided with some sort of brush, sponge or other form of implementation. Painting dates back millenia, with the earliest, known painting being over 45,500 years old, drawn with red ochre pigment on a cave wall depicting three sulawesi warty pigs, with many more cave paintings being known, for instance nearly 350 that have been discovered in France and Spain, being dated back to prehistoric times.

The art of painting has been experimented with and honed constantly since these primal drawings and can be found all throughout history, such as The Renaissance, in which humans began to explore and rediscover human achievements such as literature, science and art which brought famous artworks such as the 'Mona Lisa' by Leonardo da Vinci in 1503, 'The Birth of Venus' by Sandro Botticelli in 1486 and 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' by Hieronymus Bosch in 1515. This period in time created some of the most influential painters and paintings in history that would go on to inspire more talented and great artists throughout the years, including Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali to name a few.

Other workflows however were developed much more recently, such as the creation of digital art, being any form of art that was generated with or with assistance of computer technology, as well as any art that incorporates digital art into itself.

Digital art was first achieved by John Whitney in the 1960s who created shapes and patterns out of mathematical operations, such as his art piece 'Catalogue' made in 1961. These patterns soon developed into computer-generated animation, with one of the earliest examples being 'Computer Ballet' made by Michael Noll in 1965, featuring multiple stick figures dancing around a flat plane as though they were performing ballet.

Computer generated art was a big development in the world of 2D art as it gave people the ability to create mathematically 'perfect' art, by allowing them to define the exact length and angle of any drawn line and being able to replicate another digital image exactly with no flaws. As such, tools relating to digital art are still used prominently today, whether to create art with the intention of entertaining yourself or others, to plan out construction of a building or object, for advertisement or business purposes, and many more functions that all contribute to many different causes.

2D art in its entirety has existed for millenia, with the very first examples being cave paintings I mentioned previously, displaying simple silhouettes of wildlife created by cavemen over 40,000 years ago, with the purpose of these drawings being unknown and highly disputed.

 Since this point, 2D art has evolved greatly, such as the work of historical surgeons, two being Galen and Vesalius. Both Galen and Vesalius were huge stepping stones towards our current understanding of human anatomy today, as they dissected humans and animals and noted their findings in both writings and drawings. These sketches are some of the first great examples of how 2D art was used as an educational tool, giving people visuals into how the human body worked and how the skeleton was constructed.

Vesalius lived and created his artwork during the Renaissance, during which time 2D art exploded in creation and usage, with a very important example being Leonardo da Vinci, who created some of the most influential art to date including the famous 'Mona Lisa' in 1503, as well as the 'Vitruvian Man' which served a similar purpose to Vesalius's and Galen's art, being used to showcase the proportions of a healthy, adult, human male.

As 2D art has existed for so long, it would be impossible for it to have never caused any controversy or criticism. One example would be the dispute of what is even considered to be "art".

Because "art" is such a broad and inclusive term, people have frequently questioned where the line is that defines something as "art", with many recent examples including modern and abstract art such as the works of Jackson Pollock, made up of paint dripped and streaked across a canvas made to represent Pollock's emotions and thoughts. Some of Pollock's artworks have been priced up to nearly £50,000,000 which has caused controversy as while to some they appear as a revolutionary, experimental new art style, to others they appear as meaningless cacophonies of paint, unworthy of their price.

There have been numerous definitions of art throughout the years. As of writing this, the Oxford definition for art is "the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power". However, many disagree with this definition, such as those who believe art doesn't have to display "beauty or emotional power" and simply has to be thought provoking. Due to the disagreements over the definition of art, many attempts at defining it have been vague or open-ended. Canadian Philosopher Marshall McLuhan defined art as "anything you can get away with.", a quote that has been popularised by leading figure in the Pop Art movement, Andy Warhol.

With art being contextual and constantly changing, it is impossible to create one definite definition to describe art and therefore, the true definition of art will almost certainly remain a controversy for some time.

Many are also concerned about the rise of AI-generated or assisted art, with programs such as DALL-E and Midjourney taking prompts inputted by users and creating artwork that displays the AI's best attempt for what that prompt looks like.

The discussion on whether this advancing technology is a positive or a threat is very divided, with many embracing AI artwork as it massively improves the rate at which art can be produced, which could help companies and businesses to display their ideas or advertise their products much more efficiently and would mean they would need to invest less into advertising cost and time. However, many people, including lots of artists, are against AI-generated art for various reasons. For instance, people are worried that with machines being able to create images in seconds, human-created art will become too time-consuming and obsolete, therefore reducing the amount of available art-related jobs and essentially turning 2D art into a pointless skill. Artist Dave McKean said in an interview "that's just doing my job, I'm now redundant".

Another concern about the usage of AI art is how artwork and art styles are stolen without consent or proper credit given. The way that most AI generate their art is by being access to large sample sizes of pre-existing artwork and using that as a reference to guess how an image should look. However, the images used are often taken straight from the Internet without first consulting the original artist, meaning their work could be used in assisting an AI-generated piece of artwork that gains profit and exposure, whilst the original artist receives no benefits for their work being used.

This has also expanded into legal disputes, as on July 19th, artists Kelly McKernan, Sarah Andersen and Karla Ortiz went to court against the AI image generators Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DreamUp over their art style being used and replicated in images generated by these programs due to their copyrighted artwork being used in the database of images provided to the AIs without their consent. The artists lost the case to the AI companies, largely due to it being effectively impossible to prove their art was used in training the AI, as well as the fact that although they owned the copyrights to their art, they had not registered their copyrights prior to filing the lawsuit.

The first video games were very simplistic in terms of graphics, being very limited by the technology of the time and having very little room to experiment with graphics and movement. The earliest video games were portrayed with lights that would turn on and off to simulate images and movement, such as a game of draughts/checkers created by Christopher Strachey in 1952. A few years later, as computers began to advance further, more video games began creation, such as Tennis for Two in 1958, Spacewar in 1962 and, Pong in 1972.

With the release of these games, especially Pong, video games began to become more widely known and more people became interested in playing them and working on them, which only grew further as more accessible means to play video games were released to the public such as arcade machines in the early 1970s, cartridge-based home consoles in the late 1970s to early 1980s and the rise of home computers also in the early 1980s.

Due to the limited hardware and understanding of technology at the time, the large majority of these games were rendered with simple 2D graphics, such as pixel art, such as in Space Invaders or Pac-Man, or vector graphics, such as in Asteroids or Star Wars (1983), meaning that the usage of 2D art was less of a choice at the time and more of a limiting factor. Proper 3D graphics were mostly unavailable until the 1990s and even then were very limited, creating many polygonal and blocky games, such as Virtua Fighter or Tomb Raider.