Origin of digital art

Traditional paintings can never be dated on a timeline accurately, the origin can be extremely debatable. The first made cave paintings that we have been able to find and date is of a life-sized picture of a wild pig that was painted at least 45 and a half thousand years ago in Indonesia. The oldest painting on canvas was made between the mid 14th century and the early 15th century though the dating is highly controversial.

 In the pre Renaissance period the paintings were made on solid medias like wooden panels. The process of painting on physically media that could be touched and felt was the only known and possible way for hundreds of years.

 But the things were about to change with the introduction of digital art. The term was first used in the early 1980s when engineers created a program what could paint. Later Harold Cohen became the pioneer of a group of artists who focuses primarily on non physical media to paint on, a.k.a Digital artists. Almost 70 years prior to this revolution, on September 14, 1914, Benjamin Laposky was born. Laposky was a mathematician who used an oscilloscope to manipulate electronic waves on a screen, which inspired several people to use mechanical devices to manipulate waves into visual patterns. 

By the second world war the seeds of digital art had started to germinate and the works of people like Herbert Frank and Georg Nees used waves and algorithm generated patterns to form shapes and designs which acted as a precursor and gave rise to Digital as we know it today.

~ Neel Banerjee