The technological eye and the artistic hand: the aesthetic transformation of image representation in the Digital Era

Abstract

The digital environment has shifted the balance between the optical and technical apparatus that records the visible and the artistic gesture, sharpening the question of where authorship is located within a work. The divergence between treating digital instrumentation as a continuation of optical vision and treating it as a rupture that displaces manual craft remains unresolved. The aim of the study is to reconstruct the mechanism of the aesthetic transformation of image representation through the relation between two analytical categories, provisionally designated as the technological eye and the artistic hand. Comparative-historical, semiotic, phenomenological and morphological methods are applied to a corpus of theoretical texts and artistic practices of 2021-2026. It is found that the transition from the painterly mode to the optical-recording mode and further to the algorithmic-generative mode does not abolish the artistic gesture but relocates it from the phase of execution to the phase of selection, tuning and parameterisation. Representation shifts from mimetic capture to parametric construction, so that aesthetic value is redistributed from the trace of the hand to the configuration of the conditions of generation. The comparison of the three modes shows that the technological eye does not cancel the hand but reconfigures its function; it is precisely the preservation of the selecting and authenticating gesture that keeps the digital image within the field of artistic representation, separating it from an automatic visual product.