Alchemie Digital Art is the website of the digital artist D.R. Preedy.
From wave form manipulation to A.I. generative art, D.R. Preedy uses different digital art techniques to explore and reveal expressions of humanity.
“As the digital permeates our physical world more and more, I want to unearth within this vast array of data an underlying expression of humanity. Whether this is through an evolution of concept or form, or from A.I. interpretations of emotion, perhaps somewhere within this digital jumble that appears so soulless, we can ultimately find what it means to be human.”
The Alchemie Manifesto
The Emerging Movement
It is irrefutable that a new wave of artistic expression has emerged driven by recent advances in blockchain technology and the potential for irrefutable provenance trails of non-fungible tokens. But how will this movement be remembered?
Creating art in the digital space is hardly a new phenomenon. But apart from the early experimentations of pioneers in the 1950’s and 1960’s, from the likes of Ben Leposky, Desmond Paul Henry, and the visionaries at Bell Laboratories such as Lillian Schwartz and Michael Noll, it has mostly been the work of a craft, creating forms and scenes for television, films and video games. It is undeniable that there is a vast amount of talent involved with this, but now as we enter this new renaissance of the digital medium we have the opportunity to use it for artistic expression and to further explore the medium itself, much like those early pioneers.
So as we look past the multiple collections of character renderings, we find ourselves asking, what will be the defining works of this new NFT movement? Perhaps one such work is Pak’s piece “The Pixel” which, just like a swatch of paint, represents the building block for all digital art. Or perhaps it is Beeple’s work “Human One”, a dynamic sculpture that changes in time according to the artist’s intervention, that will set art in a new direction. Or perhaps we have only hit the tip of the iceberg for what concepts may yet define art for future generations.
Digital Abstracts
The digital space is the prima materia, the blank space where all is possible. No longer is the artist restricted by materials, colours, forms, or dimensionality. Within this space the artist can harness creation in its pure form. Whilst the traditional artist has always aimed to arrest motion or to capture emotion in a single image, within the digital space these concepts can be expanded with the fluidty of time.
I seek to explore the possibilities of this medium with the use of digital abstracts to represent complex thought. I favour the abstract over the actual and the creation of forms outside of the physical. I favour the dimensionality of time to produce diverse spatial relationships and unexpected interactions. I favour the use of new concepts that both expand and challenge artistic principles. I applaud the efforts of those whose works cross the threshold between the digital and the real so that we do not lose ourselves in the illusion.
I aim to embrace this medium and challenge its possibilities and hope that other artists do the same. It is time to channel the full imaginative and emotive opportunity that this medium allows to explore concepts such as life, death and rejuvenation; spirit and matter; and the full array of human emotion that can be captured and interacted with in new and unexpected ways.