Many would claim that the traditional idioms of visual art have lost their capacity for large‐scale innovation. Arthur Danto, for example, has argued that the exhaustion of innovation is symptomatic of art having completed a historical process of self‐investigation (aimed at clarifying its own essence).1 I have indicated some of the problems with Danto's approach elsewhere.2 There is no “grand narrative” of art's self‐discovery at issue. The exhaustion of large‐scale artistic innovation is due, rather, to the fact that the structural conventions and properties that constitute pictorial representation are unable to sustain further significant development at the structural level itself. There are limits to new ways in which the representation of three‐dimensional material can be achieved within the traditional idioms alone. The emergence of abstract art opened up new possibilities here, but these, too, appear to have now been exhaustively developed in structural terms.3 In talking of structural factors, I mean specifically two basic conventions and a group of visual properties. The first convention is the semantic capacity to project likenesses of three‐dimensional items; the second is the syntactic capacity to represent these as spatially connected states of affairs—where, for example, relations of in front and behind can be distinguished from above and below. (Mathematical perspective and its variants are the most systematic forms of this.4) The structurally relevant visual properties include transitions from light to dark and the relation between contour, mass, and detail in the delineation of form. In painting, of course, these factors must also be related to color. Now if we try to explain why a specific artist is so important, or how a new movement or stylistic tendency serves to extend the scope of visual art, then reference to the role of the structural features is inescapable. Artists and tendencies refine or innovate by reworking the relation between key structural features so as to open up new possibilities for other artists. The problem is, however, that the physical nature of media such as drawing and painting places constraints on how far the structural features can be taken in new directions. To give an important example (which I will return to in Section I), when creating a picture, an artist operates, necessarily, along an axis defined by two logical extremes. The picture can be created either by marking out the contours of a three‐dimensional object or by assembling and blending marks so as to represent its mass, or, of course, by combining elements of both.5 How the artist relates to this axis is a matter of choice, but that he or she must relate to it is determined by what a picture is—as a function of line or mass or combinations thereof. Because this axis is so inescapable, it is hardly surprising that it has sustained a great deal of artistic innovation. An artist who achieves things of substance in relation to this—or other structural properties and conventions—at the same time opens up possibilities of relevance to other artists also. Ingres' drawings, for example, are executed with an economy and a precision of contour that is almost astonishing. They are exemplars of what might be got from a contour orientation. At the other extreme we find someone such as Frank Auerbach, whose paintings show the dramatic visual potential of creating form from mass, by using impastoes piled up to such a degree that an element of relief modeling appears.6 Now artists may come along whose control of contour is even finer than Ingres', or whose creation of mass is even more painterly than Auerbach. But the point is that they will only be working around extremes that have already defined the broad scope of the contour–mass structural axis. With more analysis, similar considerations could be shown to hold also in relation to the other structural conventions and properties. Since their basic scope has already been established through the work of many individuals and movements, they cannot be developed significantly further so as to sustain radical new movements or “isms.” Of course, it is still possible for artists to achieve individual creative styles. It is also possible for them to use the established idioms in new and interesting ways—often by combining them or linking them to critical ideas about the nature and function of art. But these are creative in terms of how established media are used, rather than in terms of developments that expand the very structure of picturing, sculpture, or abstraction, qua modes of representation. Obviously, the points that I am making require much more substantial argument in order to be compelling. However, if we can accept them as a viable working hypothesis concerning the limits of traditional art, then it becomes possible to contextualize the potential of new—electronically based—media in very interesting ways. The basic strategy here is to argue that some aspects of these media actually extend the structural scope of visual representation per se. This can involve, on the one hand, significant development of some of the traditional idioms' key visual properties and related effects (roughly paralleling, for example, the way in which the insistent development of chiaroscuro radically changed pictorial art, from the early seventeenth century onward). On the other hand, it can involve distinctive ontological factors that involve semantic, syntactic, and broader aesthetic features that build on—and then exceed—what traditional representation and abstraction can offer. This would be structural innovation of the most radical kind. Now, of course, many new media works combine visual, written, and audio material in ways that obliterate traditional boundaries between art forms. However, many other such works maintain a primarily visual emphasis. These will be the focus of my analysis. I will concentrate specifically on key points of interface and difference between the traditional idioms and those visually orientated images and configurations that are computer generated or depend upon computer technology for their full visual realization. It is common practice nowadays to use the term ‘digital art’ in relation to such computer‐dependent visual idioms.7 I will follow this usage. Text‐based works will only figure in the analysis insofar as they emphasize the text qua visual. Section I addresses some specific hybrids of traditional and digital art and the way in which the latter radicalizes some of the structural visual properties noted earlier. In Section II, I identify some ontological features that are distinctive to digital idioms and that extend the structural scope of visual representation and abstraction. Section III explores two further important aspects of this extension, namely, interactive and evolutionary programs and hardware. In Section IV, I consider, in detail, the implications of the foregoing for how art might be seen as transformed and taken in new directions, in terms of both the structural scope of visual representation and the concept of art itself. 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