From Pigments to Pixels
Why Art and Technology Have Always Belonged Together
We often imagine art and technology as opposites. I think the story is different: from Renaissance painters grinding rare minerals into pigments to today's artists coding immersive digital worlds, creativity has always relied on technical skill. The divide is less a truth than a myth we've inherited.
September 2025
Excerpt from Johannes Vermeer's
The Art of Painting, c. 1666 - 1668, oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna.
When I was at university, many folks talked about art and technology as if they sit on opposite sides of a spectrum. The general gist is that art is emotional, soulful, and human; technology is mechanical, cold, and logical. But if you look closer, that supposed divide doesn't really hold up. I believe art and technology have always been entwined, each pushing the other forward.
The Old Masters Were Technologists Too
Take the Renaissance masters. Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci weren't just painters and sculptors, they were inventors, engineers, and anatomists. Leonardo's notebooks are filled with sketches of flying machines, hydraulic pumps, and optical experiments. His art and his engineering curiosity fed one another.
Centuries later, Rembrandt and Vermeer had to be just as technically skilled. They experimented with pigments and varnishes like chemists, carefully mixing compounds that would age well and produce luminous effects. As outlined in the documentary Tim's Vermeer, some historians believe Vermeer used an early optical device called a "camera obscura" to achieve his extraordinary sense of light and perspective.
Even the colors on their canvases were products of deep technical knowledge. Ultramarine, for instance, came from grinding lapis lazuli into a fine powder. This was a painstaking and expensive process that required as much precision as artistry. In other words, these painters were not apart from technology. They were immersed in it.
The Romantic Myth of the Solitary Genius
But where does the idea of the artist as a lone, mystical genius come from?
Much of it can be traced back to the 19th century, when Romanticism reshaped how Europe imagined creativity. Poets like Byron and Goethe cultivated an image of the artist as a visionary, someone touched by inspiration in ways ordinary mortals could never access. This wasn't just about talent, it was about aura, mystery, and even suffering.
The myth deepened in the 20th century. Van Gogh's life, cut short and troubled, became a kind of template for the "tortured artist" narrative. Picasso was marketed not just as a painter but as a force of nature, someone who seemed to bend the world around him. Popular culture amplified these stories; films, biographies, and art criticism reinforced the notion that art springs fully formed from individual genius, untethered from the material or technological world.
As Female Gaze has argued in a sharp critique of this myth, it erases the collaborations, materials, and technical scaffolding that make art possible. Of course, the solitary genius is captivating, but mostly a fiction. In reality, artists have always relied on networks of knowledge, workshops of apprentices, and the technologies of their time.
Capture of the Processing programming framework in action,
generating dots that spawn and fade over time. Created by Daniel
Shiffmann
Crazy Dots: Multiple Particle Systems.
Today's Brushes Are Digital
Nowadays the relationship between art and technology is even more obvious. Digital painting tablets, VR sculpting, generative AI, and creative coding platforms have expanded the artist's toolbox into entirely new dimensions. A CNC machine or 3D printer can be as expressive as a chisel or paintbrush, enabling forms that could not exist otherwise.
The line between material and digital is blurring, too. Artists create hybrid works using laser cutters, custom polymers, and even biotechnology. A gallery piece might involve as much software and circuitry as it does canvas and paint.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Floating Piers installation were a
series of walkways installed at Lake Iseo near Brescia, Italy.
(Source:
Wikimedia Commons)
This is not limited to the digital realm. The Christo and Jeanne-Claude (famous for wrapping entire buildings and landscapes with fabric) required a deep understanding of material science, engineering, and logistics to transform their monumental visions into reality. On the other end of the spectrum, media artist Tamiko Thiel creates immersive VR and AR environments that merge digital imagery, interactivity, and conceptual depth. This art would literally not exist without advanced computing.
ReWildAR, augmented reality installation, Tamiko Thiel and /p,
2021. Commissioned by Ashley Molese for the 175th anniversary
FUTURES exhibit of the Smithsonian Institution, at the Arts and
Industry Building. (Source:
Arts at MIT)
As one recent overview on Artsper put it, technology does not diminish art. It continually expands its scope. The same theme was echoed by the Tate Modern's 2024 exhibition Electric Dreams, which highlighted artists experimenting with cybernetics, computers, and even AI decades before the internet era. These examples show that "new media" art is only the latest chapter in a much longer story.
While art and technology should not be regarded as opposites, it is also true that artists and technologists often approach their work with different intentions. An engineer or programmer usually aims for efficiency, reliability, and functionality. They solve problems in ways that can be measured and replicated. An artist, on the other hand, may deliberately embrace ambiguity, imperfection, or emotional resonance, seeking to provoke reflection rather than resolve a technical challenge. These differences do not divide the two worlds so much as give them complementary strengths: technology provides the rigor of structure, while art injects meaning and human depth.
Two Sides of the Same Impulse
Far from being in conflict, art and technology have always shared a symbiotic relationship. Technology provides new tools and mediums; art gives those tools meaning, context, and human resonance. Both come from the same impulse: to explore, to shape, to imagine new realities.
Or, as Aaron Hertzmann notes in his essay When Machines Change Art, every technological shift, from photography to AI, may feel disruptive, but history shows it becomes part of the creative toolkit.
I am really keen on the next time someone sets art and technology in opposition. Putting together this little article helped me see that the myth of the solitary genius may be romantic, but the truth is far richer. Every masterpiece, whether painted with pigments or coded with pixels, is the product of both. Now I know how to respond.
And of course, any article about art and technology would be incomplete, if I don't mention the demoscene.
(Say it with me one more time) this is a global subculture where programmers, musicians, and digital artists collaborate to create real-time audiovisual works that push computers to their limits.
Every demo is both an artwork and a technical feat: intricate 3D graphics, music, and design all compressed into impossibly small file sizes, running live on hardware that often was not built for such creativity. In the demoscene, there might be roles like the developer, the graphician, and the musician. But together they work towards creating demo art. They completely blur the line between engineer and artist. You could say that code and pixels become brushstrokes, and algorithms become choreography.
The demoscene is living proof that art and technology not only coexist but can flourish most brilliantly when they are inseparable.