Da alquimia clássica à alquimia digital: da pedra lascada aos bits/da arte rupestre à arte generativa

Abstract

Among the many forms of alchemy, such as alchemy of chemistry, alchemy in psychology, alchemy in spirituality, we highlight a new form, the Digital Alchemy. This is a form of expression created by man and machine, in a cocreative process that materializes through what we call Digital Matter. The concept of transmutation of matter is essential in Classical Alchemy. The element that transmute is the Philosopher's Stone, and in the Procedural Art, the Philosopher's Stone is the binary bit. Thus, Digital Matter is the essential monad with which all the most commonly used variations in the current Art computation are produced. The manipulation of those bits are the art of Digital Alchemy, and the artist who performs it is the digital alchemist. The digital alchemist always seeks a way of "producing worlds" and accomplishes this by materializing devices of some symbolization, the computers. This alchemist introduces numerically produced and executed realities in digital processing stations and, the results of this, are significantly perceived by human beings in interfaces systems. These worlds are established ontologically through the building code, the Digital Matter.But often the result extrapolates its technical or symbolic boundaries demonstrating a certain degree of autonomy, and/or regeneration, and/or generation. Digital Alchemy represents a process of symbolisation never seen in history, since its results extrapolate the representation of worlds as they exist in nature. And even, digital alchemy surpasses the concept of representation, passing the status of generator also to the copy. This is because it creates worlds with an art of the transmutation of numerical DNAs from different symbolic natures, and reaches pre and post meanings. We do all these relationships through the optics of the Computational Arts. From Classical Alchemy to Digital Alchemy, we seek to demonstrate the transformations that computing brings to the form of creating Art. And we conclude that the aesthetic expression can be a way of creating worlds.