Margot Lovejoy

Margot Lovejoy (21 October 1930 – 1 August 2019) was a digital artist and historian of art and technology.

She was Professor Emerita of Visual Arts at the State University of New York at Purchase.

She was the author of Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age. Lovejoy was the recipient of a 1987 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 1994 Arts International Grant in India.

In her best known historic work, Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age, Lovejoy followed on the research of Frank Popper, Jack Burnham and Gene Youngblood by documenting the historical record of the relationship between technology and art as culminating in digital art.

Lovejoy recounted the early histories of electronic media for art making (video, computer art, the Internet) by providing a context for the works of major artists in each media, describing their projects, and discussing the issues and theoretical implications of each to create a foundation for understanding this developing field of digital art.

In Digital Currents she explored the growing impact of digital technologies on aesthetic experience and examined the major changes taking place in the role of the artist as social communicator.

Her website Parthenia was archived by the Walker Art Center as part adaweb.com and her website TURNS was featured in the 2002 Whitney Museum Biennial.

Her work is in the collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts

She demonstrated that just as the rise of photographic techniques in the mid-19th century shattered traditional views about representation, so too have contemporary electronic tools catalyzed new perspectives on art, affecting the way artists see, think, and work, and the ways in which their productions are distributed and communicated.