I made a lot of digital work from around 1993 to 2001, mostly as a way to avoid the two main problems I was having with painting: that "conceptual" paintings - although fun to think up - were boring to execute, and that the only places to show them (this was mostly pre-internet) were really elitist.
Nowadays, I'm back to painting (I'll start posting some new paintings in a few weeks) and I'm using those digital pieces as sources - except in certain cases, such as this piece, which I don't think would work as well (and would be crazy hard to paint).
Degraded Cranach is from 2001, and was made by feeding a jpeg of one of Lucas Cranach's Lucretia paintings through a complicated Photoshop "action" I wrote. The action was meant to degrade and corrupt images almost to the point of unrecognizability, so as to see what that would do to their meanings.
Mostly I used porn, which is obviously especially plentiful on the internet and left a nice underlying sense of "wrongness" even after all of this scrubbing -- but I also used art historical sources, as in this case. I was "batch processing" the images several hundred at a time, and then picking out my favorites from the results.
Cranach had painted Lucretia poised to commit suicide, with a dagger held to her chest - but in the "degraded" version she seems to me to be some sort of electric fairy or ghost, pulling what looks to be a nozzle out of her body.
Click on the image to see a bigger version,