Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film

Over the last four decades, image-editing software has radically transformed our visual world.  The ease with which images and text can be digitally generated and altered has enabled new forms of creative experimentation while sparking philosophical debates about the very nature of representation. Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film examines the impact of digital manipulation tools from the 1980s to the present, for the first time assessing simultaneous developments and debates in photography, graphic design, and visual effects. Featuring over 100 works, the exhibition traces the emergence of distinctive digital aesthetic strategies, relationships to realism, and storytelling modes.  Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, computer science and engineering advances made it possible to design, build, and run raster graphics programs. At the same time, developments in graphical user interfaces allowed artists and designers to create and edit images directly. At the sam