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?

There are many artists using digital mediums and new technologies to produce art work, there have been for many years, as with any medium there is good digital art, bad digital art and some that should probably not be described as art at all; although the opinion will always be individual to the viewer.

Firstly I know of a local guy who has set up a website that has been set up solely to sell digital art generated with vvvv. This person is using his technical skills to produce decorations, not art, but he is happy with that, he’s not pretending to break any new ground he just wants to make some extra cash and I’m fine with that.

In March this year it was reported that David Hockney had started to produce paintings using his new Adobe Photoshop software, something that many people have been doing for years. He was quoted in the Times Online stating ‘You can actually mix the colours on the [screen]’ an embarrassingly naïve comment for someone who is meant to be professional and a leader in his field.

On the other hand there are artists using digital art and commenting on technology with their work in a more experienced and knowledgeable way. I recently went along to an open day at Jodrall Bank where artist Jeremy Wood was demonstrating how GPS technology could be used to create drawing on the landscape. Each visitor was given a basic GPS device and asked to walk a chosen shape across a field, when you returned the device you were given a printout of the path you had walked. Jeremy uses this in his own practice to create abstract drawings of cities

A recent touring exhibition ‘Trying to cope with things that aren’t human (part one)’ demonstrates a varying approach to digital art and technology, but my favourite piece was Alan Currall’s ‘Word Processing’, best described as on the official website:

‘In the video Word Processing Alan Currall offers us an image of a microchip placed on a desk with a furtive tapping finger and his own off-screen voice attempting to train it. The voice is initially calm, pedantic and meticulous in its instructions on what the chip should do if he presses a key. The lesson becomes more and more complete as the tone of the voice becomes more desperate in referencing our anxiety about computer usage and the problems we encounter with it. This anthropomorphic piece places the familiar discrepancy in the everyday relationships between machine and human into humourous and acute focus.’