It was a sunny morning Southern California. An ocean breeze was blowing in from nearby Redondo Beach, and as the freight train next door—the bane of our existence—clattered endlessly and rattled the building, we gathered in the first floor conference room of the Torrance offices of Micro Publishing News magazine to evaluate the hundred or so submissions to what, back in 1999, was our Seventh Annual Digital Art contest. It was a remarkably diverse collection of images and prints, many of which pushed the limits of what man and especially machine could produce in 1999. There were abstract images printed on standard inkjet paper. There were photographs printed on canvas. There were Maxfield Parrish-like fantasyscapes output on inkjet paper. There were Frank Frazetta-like illustrations on Fome-Cor. And there were some submissions that had “some assembly required,” and came with a detailed instruction sheet. Alexander Calder, eat your heart out.

It had been the fourth digital art contest I was involved with. It had been sponsored by HP, and first prize was a 36-inch DesignJet wide-format printer valued (at the time) at $12,000. In previous contests, our judges had included Graham Nash, whose Nash Editions was a pioneer in digital art and art output, John Doe formerly of the great punk band X, and other luminaries in what was emerging as a Southern California digital art scene. Back in the mid- and late 1990s when I first started covering wide-format, “digital art” was an actual genre, almost ghettoized, as so-called “traditional” fine artists bristled (as it were) at the notion of anything digital or computer-related. There was some initial resistance among the cognoscenti that digital art was more about adding filters to a photo in Photoshop or Illustrator, that it was more technology than talent.

Times have changed, and today there is very little distinction between digital art and art in general. Largely driving this is just basic acceptance. The mid-1990s were practically a generation ago, and younger artists today have simply grown up immersed in technology, so there is simply no reason to think of the computer any differently than one would think of a new type of paintbrush or paint formula. It’s just another tool in the artist’s arsenal that s/he uses to capture his or her artistic vision. This has been enabling for artists, but it has also helped to completely change the market for art, digital or otherwise, and even change what we think of as art.