Digitalarti Mag's blog

London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, whose collection covers 3000 years of decorative art and design, welcomes the "Decode" exhibit, which, with its 34 pieces, offers an overview of digital creation from 2003 until today. Viewings, installations and sculptures are displayed on the museum's façade, set up in the garden basin, spread on the ground or hung up on darkened walls.

The museum goer watches and physically experiences the event, which was organized in collaboration with onedotzero. Onedotzero is an organization that was created in 1996 by Matt Janson, an English movie maker, with the goal of promoting the art of the moving image, via the organization's festival of the same name. Cutting-edge, experimental and fun, this exhibit is a must-see.

The walk through "Decode", which can be experienced as a trip through the possibilities of the digital, is structured around three themes: the Code taken as an IT language made up of visual and sound data, internet, and interactivity. Daniel Brown’s On Growth and Form welcomes the spectator. Similarly to C.E.B. Reas’ Ti water lilies, these virtual flowers, inspired by objects from the museum’s permanent collection, change freely. John Maeda, the star, whose Nature series was exposed at the Fondation Cartier in 2004, has also taken up the challenge of creating software that generates shapes inspired by nature. These generative pieces –automatically self-generating—allow their creator to dive into the virtual world, and experiment with the absence of spatial and temporal limits. The world ceases to be linear, as it is in Western art, where linear perspective, symbolizing the concept of a beginning and an end, was created; instead, the world becomes circular and undetermined. Meanwhile, other artists prefer to remove themselves from the aesthetics of the real world, in order to create a virtual world made up of geometric shapes, inspired by codes and technological equipment. For Ryoji Ikeda, known for his electronic visual and sound performances, abstraction is the rule. Data.scan, with its series of lines, represents the immense quantity of data surrounding us. The entire thing, shut up inside a box, as if in a vain attempt to control the infinite.

Because they’re the fruit of complex algorithms and occasionally expensive technological materials, digital pieces require the conjunction of several types of competencies. Artists work with IT specialists, and designers create studios like Universal Everything, with Matt Pyke, or the Japanese multimedia design studio Wowlab. Film maker James Frost’s House of Card is a typical example. This video, which has won several prizes, shows the face of Radiohead singer Tom York, in 3D. No camera was used to film this clip, but cutting edge technology requiring technicians specialized in 3D imaging. Aaron Koblin later directed the interactive version of the video.

While the internet is a warehouse for certain intangible pieces, like Lia’s Arcs 21, which is freely downloadable onto an iphone, it is also the place where certain artists find their raw materials. They recuperate visual or textual data left by web surfers, and use them to create digital landscapes that convey thoughts on our society. Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar's We feel fine, Sascha Pohflepp and Karsten Schmidt's Social Collider, and Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin's Listening Post re-use phrases left by bloggers. The subsequent moving images, and the impressive installation of dozens of screens where the words are read, as they appear, by a synthesizer, give spectators a peek at the mood of the planet's inhabitants. By recuperating personal data from the net, these pieces play on our voyeuristic tendencies. They also reveal the ambivalence of internet's controlled freedom.

In the third part of the exhibit, artists use the spectator’s body to activate their pieces. Mehmet Akten’s Body Paint transforms the viewer into an action painter.

Like the wind, they can sway the branches of Simon Hejden's Tree, or control the drops of rain and aquatic waves in Wowlab's Light Rain. Technology leads back to nature, and creates connections between man and his environment. Daan Roosegaarde’s Dune, a forest of illuminated stalks, a permanent version of which can be seen on the banks of the Maas river in Rotterdam, responds to the movement and sounds of the visitors that walk through it. Dandelion, a more elaborate and less poetic version of Michel Bret and Edmond Couchot's 1990 Pissenlit, recalls the starry-eyed moments of childhood. Then the spectator loses control of his body, which continues to interact with the art. Rather than being observed, Golan Levin’s mechanical eye, Opto-Isolator, observes the spectator. rAndom International and Chris O’Shea’s Audience, which is made of dozens of mirrors spread out on the ground, spies on visitors’ gestures. The same artists used biometric facial recognition technology to create Study for a Mirror, technology which is already being used by certain casinos in France. The piece captures your image, then transcribes it directly into an ephemeral digital painting. Finally, at the circuit’s end, in the garden, is Jason Bruge’s installation, Mirror Mirror. Dozens of digital signs are spread out on the surface of the water, and light up as visitors walk by, reflecting their images back across the aquatic surface. And then the time comes to sit by the pool, and remember experiences past.

Published in the Digitalarti Mag #2.

Digitalarti Mag, the international digital art and innovation magazine.

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