He has replaced the brush with a mouse and keyboard; and the canvas with high quality digital printouts. ankur Gupta is showcasing Digital Dreams, an exhibition of electronic art - images ranging from fractrals to surrealistic landscapes.

A gold medalist in pharmacy from BITS, Pilani, and an MBA from IIM, Gupta, fell in love with his Apple Macintosh way back in 1989, and was soon using it to explore his creative frontiers. Along the way he also set up www.artindia.com, the first Indian site devoted to digital art, and is spearheading DAM (Digital Art Movement), to ensure that upcoming digital artists from India can make their presence felt in the modern contemporary art scenario.

But conventional artists might dismiss his creations as "fringe" art, a novelty and a mere curiosity. Say Gupta, "I have always regarded Digital Art as a form of creative expression; and this expression is beyond the bounds of defining tool sets and thus limiting creativity." Perhaps in the Stone Age even the use of natural minerals like charcoal or chalk to illustrate images may have been taboo, and of course the use of watercolours, oil colours or acrylic totally unimaginable! "The only art would have been to use sharp stones to etch out the visuals!

As technology has advanced so has man's imagination to use it to express himself. Needless to say, there is always resistance to change, and the world of art is no exception, " adds Gupta.

Was not the music created on synthesisers frowned upon until recently? Can the power of digitally generated music or even the microphone be denied in furthering music? Gupta believes that "looking down" rather than "looking at" Digital Art is a manifestation of insecurity in beubg unable to keep pace with the "new way of looking at things"

"Digital Dreams" offers an opportunity to experience this new way. The colours are vibrant, and the subjects diverse. The globes, circles, whirlpools, fractals...... submerge in a sea of colours to creates disturbing, and yet uplifting impressions. And as Newsweek says in its recent special edition, "The computer will eat away at the art object until art becomes an electronic event instead of a things......."

Digital Dreams Art Exhibition is on at the Nehru Circular Art Gallery, from December 14 to 20, 1999