I could easily imagine a graduate student in a painting program, sitting in a studio with a Macintosh computer and a large format printer, cranking out work, week after week, month after month, and ending up with a real kick-ass MFA show.
I'm not sure if that would have been well-received when I was in school. Of course this stuff wasn't even around then. I'm also not sure it would happen today. For one thing, it would be very, very expensive. For another, people seem so stuck in traditional methods... either that, or everything is so far-out that it's all involved with animation, film, video, time arts(?), or stuff that ends up not looking like art - conceptual, I guess.
What I am doing is, working with a computer to create a pretty traditional type of art. It's two-dimensional. It hangs on the wall. It's printed on paper, with ink. It involves color, form... line, space, texture, balance, movement. All that good stuff. I spend hours, days, weeks at a time, in front of my computer. I dream about it in my sleep. I basically go through all of the same thought processes that I do when I am actually painting, with a brush on canvas and acrylic paint. The difference is that I can work on many different things simultaneously in a shorter amount of time. I can add, subtract and edit at will.
There are big problems though. It's expensive to print large works. Expensive to frame things. And then, many people still are not receptive to the whole idea. But I am, and I do it, and I plan to continue along this road of debauchery, this life as an artist.