On visual features and artistic digital images

Techniques and tools to create and manipulate digital images have always attracted the attention of artists. Hardware and software are not only tools but also environments for expressiveness: creators and users generate and interact with images; artistic styles are recreated; spaces are reconstructed; static images mix with animated images; 2D images blend with 3D models. Moreover, digitally produced images can also be printed as physical objects using rapid prototyping technologies. Within this context, artistic practices remind us their relationship with crafts and skills. Artists not only produce images and confront us with ideas about our society and the world, but they also invent materials, discover surfaces, combine techniques and define workflows. In this article we adopt visual features as the materials for artistic digital images. More precisely, we will try to describe the main characteristics of visual features as well as some of their implications. In the last part we present our current work on motion structures as an experimental art form directly inspired from visual features.