From Digitization to the AI Era: Digital Technology Trajectories in Fine-Art Creation

This article analyzes how digital technologies have reconfigured fine-art creation from early computer graphics to contemporary generative AI. It advances a practice-centered periodization that links changing tool affordances to shifts in authorship, originality, distribution, and the political economy of creative labor. Three phases are identified: medium translation (1980–2000), when images became file-based and procedural logics entered artistic craft; platformized networking (2000–2010), whe