Q: What do you see as the appropriate arena for digital art in the long term? Is it a print-based medium, or a web-based, interactive form, or a new way to make original objects for traditional galleries?

Our expectation is that pervasive flat-panel wall-mounted displays will change this discussion in the near future. The last interesting formal problem for digital art may be to define the differences between "ambient" works suited to a digital frame, "interactive" pieces suited to a computer, and "narrative" pieces which demand a focused but passive audience - perhaps in front of a television.

Q: Given your stated aversion to traditional art world hierarchies, do you accept any work that gets offered to you?

A: Only a tiny minority (less than 5%) of submissions are accepted.

Q: I had an opportunity to see a show of ArtLexis prints and found them absolutely breathtaking - on the Internet though, the same pieces lose much of their power. Do your artists find that showing work online limits the viewers' ability to experience their "vision" of the piece?

A: Showing a low resolution, highly compressed version of a work of art over the Internet is a bit like listening to music on a tinny little transistor radio.

But music played on the radio is also intended to spur sales of records for home stereos - a better experience of the work. By the same token, we're hoping that work seen online will still show viewers enough to encourage them to buy a higher-res download or print.

Q: How do you distinguish between original artworks and “multiple originals” as per your “manifesto”. I can see your point about digital art and digital photography being naturally multiple, but since you carry “film-based” photography, isn’t the negative (or other transparency) the “original” object, making your scan of it (and any subsequent prints made from the scan) a “reproduction”?

A: Now to split some hairs...

Yes, there is a difference between the unique “objecthood” of a piece of film and the infinitely repeatable file from a digital camera. However, unlike a painting, a piece of film is generally not considered to be a piece of art. The print made from the film is the "piece". So, by scanning a piece of film and making a digital image, we aren’t “reproducing” any “original” object.

Ultimately, our criteria for what to carry boils down to two points: Does it succeed at what it tries to accomplish, and is it suited to digital distribution?

Q: You claim to be selling "fine art prints" in "open" editions. In the Art world, those are mutually exclusive terms. A true Print is always in a limited edition, of a single size, and on a single substrate. Why don't you just call what you're selling "posters"?

A: Although we refer to our prints as "fine art prints", we don't mean that in the traditional "Art World" sense of the term. We simply mean that these are high quality prints of fine art images.

However, the prints are not "posters" in the sense in which that term is usually applied to art. Typically, a "poster" is a reproduction of an original object (usually a painting). Our prints are multiple originals produced directly from the digital file which constitutes the "work" of art. Each print is an example (or "iteration") of the piece - not a reproduction.

Q: If ArtLexis artworks are available in many different sizes, from several different types of printer, how can artists (and your clients) be assured that the work is being presented as intended?

A: We calibrate all of our monitors and output devices to a single, independent digital target so that everything we produce will be as closely calibrated to everything else as possible.

Our attitude towards the scale of a digital image is that it is inherently variable - - pixels have no physical dimension until one is assigned to them. All of our artists give us their work in what we call its "native resolution" (the number of pixels they originally used for a piece, which might be high or low) knowing that we will offer it for sale in a range of sizes.