Any prominent societal ‘currency’ is taken up by artists (and technologists and engineers) as an experimental medium. "Every culture will use the maximum level of technology available to it to make art" - Scott Draves, Generative Artist.
Recent societal currencies of prominence and dominance have included technology, information, biology, and raw data. All have been taken up by artists, scientists, laypersons, and other practitioners through the ease of widely available Internet-based tools (Examples in Figure 1).
The question would obviously arise as to ‘What are the next media for art?’ (e.g.; the continually new New Media). One way to answer is to prognosticate upcoming societal currencies. Some advancing societal currencies could be 3D printing feedstock (already starting to be exploited as an artistic medium), and pink goo – having more granularity and diversity of categories in synthetic biology.
Recent societal currencies of prominence and dominance have included technology, information, biology, and raw data. All have been taken up by artists, scientists, laypersons, and other practitioners through the ease of widely available Internet-based tools (Examples in Figure 1).
Figure 1: Digital Art, InfoViz, BioArt, DataArt