What Exactly Is Digitalpoetism & Beyond?

A new article by Gracela Einarson explores the ideas, experience and modern technology behind Eldar Einarson’s distinctive visual expression.

What happens when more than sixty years of experience with images and storytelling meet digital technology and artificial intelligence?

That question lies at the heart of Digitalpoetism & Beyond, the term created by Norwegian filmmaker, author and visual artist Eldar Einarson to describe the artistic territory he is now exploring.

At 79, Einarson is using new digital tools to continue something he has been doing throughout his professional life: creating images, shaping stories and searching for expressions that can make people stop, look and feel something.

Digitalpoetism belongs broadly within digital art, and artificial intelligence is openly part of the creative process. But the finished works emerge through a continuing series of human decisions about composition, colour, light, atmosphere, characters and narrative.

Ideas are developed, images generated and changed, elements moved or removed, and unsuccessful versions discarded until the work expresses what Einarson is looking for.

His starting point is not the traditional craft of the painter. It is a lifetime spent directing films, composing images and telling stories.

The resulting works do not attempt to fit neatly into a conventional artistic category. Some are quiet and melancholic, others colourful, playful or humorous. Einarson himself describes the territory he is exploring as somewhere between kitsch and fine art.

What connects them is a desire to create something that reaches beyond the technology used to make it.

For Einarson, Digitalpoetism & Beyond is ultimately an exploration of what can happen when human experience, imagination and emotion encounter tools that barely existed a few years ago.

And perhaps the most interesting question is not whether the result should be called digital art, AI art, kitsch or fine art.

It is much simpler:

Does the image make us stop, look and feel something?

The full story can be read on Mindanao Advice.