Leave No Trace

This week we went down to see the Decode exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t what we got. The first piece we encountered was a series of fans at the Underground entrance to the museum, this was amusing as it required a little interactivity to get the fans moving, but not obviously linked to the show. The second was ‘bit.code’ a specially commissioned piece in the main entrance of the museum, this involved a little more technological ingenuity; it was a series of black and white belts spinning around to a series of codes.

It wasn’t until entering the exhibition that the three underlying themes became apparent; Code, Interactivity and Network. The code, whilst perhaps interesting to the code connoisseur, was little more than a display of pretty patterns that the average Joe Bloggs on the street might relate to screensavers or those annoying sound responsive illustrations on Microsoft Media Player. There seemed to be little concept behind what was essentially a demonstration of the different techniques available to Digital Artists. Then came Network; in the style of The Public in West Bromwich half of the exhibits in this section were turned off and re-booted whilst we were there. Of those that were working there was one of note ‘We Feel Fine: an almanac of human emotion’ where text found on weblogs including the phrases ‘I feel’ and ‘I am feeling’ has been collected and arranged for your perusal. By far the most popular section of the exhibition was the Interactive display. There were many fun digital based activities that you could explore, mostly consisting of wall based projections that responded to you moving past. Again there was little concept behind the artworks but that didn’t seem to matter when there were children and adults alike running around excitedly trying out all the activities.

The exhibition as a whole was made an exciting experience with the use of atmosphere. Darkened lighting and black walls created a sense of discovery; there was an anticipation of what new and exciting technology would be waiting around the next corner. It was great to see an exhibition focussing wholly on digital media but I do feel a little disappointed that all we were shown was essentially a demonstration of the different techniques available; would a theme have been too ambitious?