Juan Villagomez - Lev Manovich

For me, media has transformed from traditional forms, like drawing on a piece of paper to drawing with a tablet on the computer, and both methods are capable of generating the same job, however I find the difference is in the physical nature, or rather lack thereof. I contemplate this notion whenever I create a work of art through these mediums because I think about the existence of the piece. A drawing on a piece of paper is real while the computer version is not unless it’s printed because there’s a sense of validity with having a physical copy. This raises questions like, what if it never gets printed, is the work just floating around as bits of data?