You enter the Decode: Digital Design Sensations exhibition wading through a corridor filled with waist-high plastic straws with sound-reactive lit tops (Dune, Daan Roosegaarde). Further on wall mounted screens take over, where programmers show how different computer codes can be used as design tools, creating colourful, ever changing visuals. They are all very artistic and (some) beautiful, but not too exciting and I can’t help thinking ‘fancy screen savers’. The message behind them is more interesting then the actual presentation: computer programmers have now joined the digital arts. Sharing codes in open-source libraries means new possibilities are constantly and very rapidly evolving – we’re in the infancy of a ‘new’ art form.
The exhibition is made up by three different themes – ‘code’, ‘interactivity’ and ‘network’. After being guided into the exhibition space by the Code introduction, the work becomes a mixture of Interactivity and Network. Interactivity uses a combination of different technologies – like cameras, sensors and tracking – to enable the visitor to interact with the work. You become part of the show here, a performer communicating with the art and helping the exhibition to develop. It’s all very playful and liberating. Hold a position in front of Study for a Mirror (rAndom International), which looks like a dark mirror, and watch while the screen slowly prints your image using light. Your image is being recorded by a hidden camera and then transmitted to the screen. Move and the old image will slowly fade away as a new image emerges. It was a bit creepy to discover the strange looking guy standing behind you, staring back at you from the screen.
One of my favourites has to be Mehmet Akten’s Body Paint, where you paint a virtual ‘canvas’. Your body movements register areas of colours on the screen, if you wave your arm in front of it it creates waves of colour, or you can throw splashes of colour onto it. Very entertaining, especially for younger visitors. That it something else I liked about this exhibition – it appeals to everyone regardless of age or background.
Network looks at how we are connected through systems of networks. Messages and everyday communications are recorded (or created) and displayed to us in various artistic digital displays. It’s fascinating to see human traces visualised, one display that really grabbed me was Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns. All flights from, to and within USA in one day are monitored on the screen, showing up as electric lines, as well as the number of aircrafts up in the air at the same time, and the time of the day. It’s fascinating to see how crowded the atmosphere is, with millions of people flying between continents every day. It evokes questions about pollution and safety, but also admiration for our advanced technology, which has shortened distances and allowed us to be so tightly connected across the whole globe.
Decode is a very enjoyable demonstration of how far digital technology has come, and how it can be used as an artform. Innovative, enlightening and easily accessible. Digital art is becoming mainstream.
* Decode commissioned designer Karsten Schmidth to create an open-source marketing campaign for the exhibition. He created an animation for the exhibition and then published the code on the website below. Visitors are invited to rework the code and change the appearance of the exhibition’s marketing identity, creating an ever changing image for the duration of the exhibition. You need a camera on your computer.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/decode/recode
Visit Decode website here http://www.vam.ac.uk/microsites/decode/