Some time ago (Feb 2017) I gave a talk on "Artful Computing" to the Cheltenham branch of the British Computer Society (of which I am a member). I was listened to very respectfully, but in the question and answer session one of the audience members suggested that my digital art did not appeal to him because it did not express feeling.
I understand where he is coming from, but I think that it is an unnecessarily narrow view of what constitutes valid or worthwhile forms of art.
The emphasis in the modern art world on "self-expression" is after all relatively recent. Artists in the past have had many motivations underlying their work: they have been required to provide decorative surfaces, tell stories, uplift the viewer to a higher moral plane, provide titillation, illustrate ideas, describe the world as it is..... and so on and so on. Of course, other kinds of media now do many of these jobs often more cheaply and perhaps even better than a traditional visual artist, so what is there left for an artist to do? Possibly the only unique thing an artist can now offer is his particular view of the world and what he feels about it - and perhaps what he can make us feel about it.
In this respect it is of course very difficult to be original, and find something to say and feel that has not been done before Unfortunately, it sometimes feels as though nothing less that Alexander Pope's "What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd" will make the work of art worth the considerable effort.
Perhaps I am less ambitious, or perhaps I have a wider view. I think that it is OK to produce visual works that intrigue the intellect, without necessarily wringing the heart-strings. I do not think that I am out of step with much of art history. We may now admire the Impressionists for the "feeling" in their paintings, but to a large extent they just believed that they were proving a better way of describing what their eyes experienced. Movements in abstract art in the early 20th Century were not at all concerned with feeling: they sought a language of art based on "meaning free" symbols.
All I claim for the work that I do is that there were abstract ideas that interested me, leading to a visually arresting result, and that it may just possible interest you as well.