The globalisation concept employs electronic and digital intermediaries, as well as the Internet, as its means of interaction. Communication, the central part of the globalisation concept, is practised through the Internet. Digital technology and the Internet enable active, instant and mutual exchange of information between individual participants beyond the boundaries of their countries, religions and continents. Electronic communication is also achieved visually. Its visuality is the volume of various types of information, a sum of different contents originating in historical cultural sediment and modern events. The Internet has made these contents available to all.

Due to the demand for mass communication, the phenomenon of reproduction has been given great importance in the electronic media. (Reproduction is implemented by means of a screen image, connected to the Internet, and used by a large number of recipients. According to some data, there are at presently more than 500 million Internet users).

As technical innovations, digital technology and the Internet should lead to a shift in the boundaries of expression of the existing media, according to the rules of history, and to the creation of an entirely new branch of visual art. (Let us recall the previous example, the invention of the motion picture, which was created as the result of scientific experiments as well as the influences of painting in the first decades of the previous last century, and resulted in the art of film and the introduction of new formal art solutions in painting, montage being the most obvious example.)

Changes towards innovation in fine arts have first taken place in painting, so far. They occurred in the authentic, unique work of art. Now, all the actualised media are based on replication, the visual material of which is susceptible to digital processing, such as motion pictures and photography. As far as the fine arts are concerned, graphical art has found itself in the centre of the modern events, due to its replicative nature, and it has become more topical than ever before in its history. This new position induces the need to further review the present standings in graphic art, as well as the possibility of its further development. Two issues arise in this respect.

The first concerns the possibility for new images to be generated using graphic art, as it is a replicative art, suited to the demands of the information revolution.

This seemingly attractive thought would finally move graphic art from the undesirable position of a marginal art, which it has held in the past in comparison with painting and sculpture, as well as removing the criticism that it has been sidetracked paths in its development. However, it is a fact that graphic art achieved full autonomy as a visual art with the rise of its artistic value in the mid-19th century. Since the birth of photography graphic art has been devoid of the its strongly illustrative and reproductive function. Let us recall the internal revolution that occurred in intaglio during the impressionist period, in the experimental works of C. Pissarro and E. Degas, as well as the new woodcut expressiveness achieved by P. Gauguin, thus reviving this exhausted technique and allowing it a path of development towards German expressionism, or the later booming of graphics and prints in the 60's with lithography and serigraphy, from abstract expressionism to pop and op art in the US and England. These examples do not attrib- ute to the subordinate role, but to the parallel development that graphic art could offer the poetics of different movements and thus participate autochthonously in the general development of fine arts.

Each revolution in visual arts is determined by changes in relations towards reality. Categories of time and space are re-evaluated within its boundaries, but the entire issue is only the consequence of innovations occurring in science and technology.²

The implementation of digital technology in the information revolution introduced a revision of the idea of space and time. To cite P. Virilo³, who said that the relationship towards space, i.e. the horizon set by the discovery of geometric perspective during the Renaissance, has changed with the implementation of the Internet. The image of space has expanded. There is no longer an optical perception boundary. It is practically possible to reach any point on the planet by way of a screen image, which is the horizon substitute. The possibility of instant access to visual information has contracted the category of time. Geographic time differences are reduced to such an extent that they are abolished, which has led to the compression of time.

A trans-national world society, together with its artistic contents, now functions in this time and space. Its primary media, the screen, emanates a new, virtual reality, which represents a substitute for the unmediated experience of nature (surroundings).

Such large changes in the understanding of time, space and finally reality consequentially affect the perception and entire sensory apprehension. The new visual sensibility created in this manner strives to be attained in a fitting artistic image. It cannot be labelled as graphic art, photography or painting in the traditional sense, as it was created through the circumstances of new technology, and possesses specific formal and structural solutions.⁴ However, the new image has undoubtedly employed formal elements from existing branches of art. In this respect, graphic elements - lines, area relations and image structural composition - continue to develop. Transferred to digital notation and open to digital processing, they participate in the creation of new structures-digitally animated, three-dimensional, etc. The visual conception of the graphic image corresponds to the demands of digital imaging: clear areas with distinct, easily and instantly comprehensible relations, the great significance of the line, as well as the use of the point, it being the smallest common denominator (carrier) on record. It is precisely here that we find the genetic connection between digital recording and the processes of serigraphy or silk-screen printing. The digital binary record represents the logical continuum of the previous dot matrix structures of these reproduction processes. Bearing this in mind, we can conclude that graphic art is one of the origins in creating new visuality and finally - new aesthetics.