Yes, it may not be directly relevant to this blog, but I’ve been reading a lot lately about generative art and Voronoi diagrams and felt overwhelmed by the maths, so it’s refreshing to see a different, non-technical approach.

The first thing I noticed was that apparently if you are going to put on a digital art exhibition you have to paint the walls black. I’m still not sure why, in London this worked as the exhibition was in a light tight room that emphasised the brightness of the screens and made the projections easier to view. However in Sheffield the room was quite small and there were two very large doors left wide open at the entrance that drained the colour from the room. It didn’t help that it was a particularly sunny day.

Most of the work on display was essentially 2D and wall based, and the 3D pieces seemed to be pushed up against the wall so they could only be viewed from three sides not four, which seemed to limit the work. Annoyingly this was the work that I found most interesting, but that could be because I’d actually seen a lot of the other work before at Decode.

The main focus of the Code:Craft exhibition was Mehmet Akten’s ‘Body Paint’ which had been at Decode. It is a nice interactive piece that will attract families; I must admit I quite enjoyed playing around with it again. Golan Levin, who exhibited ‘Opto-isolator II’ at Decode, was showing ‘Obzok’ here another interactive piece. This one you could mess around with using a mouse on a coffee table. Daniel Brown’s ‘Software as Furniture’ was very similar to C.E.B Reas’ ‘TI’ at Decode, circular, generative, down facing projections, though this time onto crockery. Incidentally this was only piece that seemed to fit the theme of the exhibition:

‘Digital technologies now thread through most aspects of our everyday lives. The artists in this exhibition use computing as a tool, medium and subject, exploring our cultural and even spiritual relationships with the digital world.’

C.E.B Reas were also in the Code:Craft exhibition with ‘Network A.’ Now I don’t want to get into an argument with the people that wrote Processing, the programming language, but if the curators had added a bit more information about the process of the work then I might have been able to view it as more than a screensaver on a big screen. For me this is the biggest problem facing those putting on digital art exhibitions, getting across to the general public how this work is made. The most disappointing part of Decode was the row of screen after screen of generative imagery that reminded me of the starscape and drainpipe screensavers that have since been replaced with photo slide shows. This type of artwork has to offer something new to people who have now grown up with computers and are increasingly hard to impress. Willaim Ngan’s ‘Mosumi’ in Code:Craft offered a bit more of a hypnotic experience and perhaps would have benefitted from the bigger screen.

For me the two most interesting pieces were David Dessen’s ‘Foldable Fractal’ and Daniel Widrig’s ‘Cloud Like’, quite similar in process these were two sculptures that were cut by machine. They were a visual contrast to the rest of the exhibition and for me put all the digital information, seen in the other pieces, into a tangible form; an object that could be picked up or walked around.

Personally I would like to see a digital art exhibition that explores all types of digital art, in many different forms, one that shows digital art now, not in some fake futuristic looking environment.

His latest post is about another of his rapid-prototyping projects, where he created a cup using Processing, based on meteorological data. It looks slipshod to say the least, but those variations are caused by climate change, and they reveal a trend. It’s a particularly interesting example of data visualisation, an area which will only grow in importance.

The Guardian newspaper has published many articles over recent years on opening up data e.g. on Ordnance Survey maps and crime, the London datastore is perhaps the first for many cities in this country (see also Transport for London), and the recent publication of the COINS database on government spending could lead to some interesting work.

At an apparently more prosaic, or at least human scale, Jeremy Wood is a GPS artist capturing activities like mowing the lawn, on display at Tenderpixel in London until 22 June.

There is so much potential for digital artists to use this data (though being confident in the use of APIs is a hefty requirement). But [the teeming void] doesn’t just capture data in interesting ways. He writes about it too. His post on the underlying messages about data in a series of IBM commericals is fascinating, and highly recommended reading on the slyly manipulative approach.

This sounds like an exciting opportunity to exploit new media to the full, to show how it can transform writing, or more accurately experiencing a story. That’s what some people are claiming the iPad will do for the magazine industry, but it could be much wider than that.

One of the many activities associated with the exhibition was Recode Decode: the opportunity to remix the exhibition’s ident created by Karsten  Schmidt, with the winner’s submission being displayed on screens in London Underground stations.

This is a great idea, and a lot of remixes are appearing in various places on the web in addition to the V&A’s website, especially Flickr and Vimeo, so it seems to have captured people’s imaginations.

http://vimeo.com/10885776

http://vimeo.com/9590019

http://vimeo.com/9496288

http://vimeo.com/8658509

http://vimeo.com/8636469

http://vimeo.com/8217274

http://vimeo.com/8217357

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ambgab/4262661874/in/pool-13813978@N00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dietapete/4193219903/in/pool-13813978@N00

 I wonder if we could borrow and adapt this idea for our exhibition?

Having said that there are two new toys we are researching, CrazyTalk6 with which you can make your own characters talk and make facial expressions. And Arduino, which the website describes as

‘Arduino is a tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than your desktop computer. It’s an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board.’

We are also currently experimenting with a new ‘Things To Do’ page on the museum website, to try and get people using the website and get them a bit more involved with what’s happening at the museum. We like to try and keep the activities themed to the exhibitions that will be on at the Museum during the workshops, so for digital summer we have ‘Spot On for 25 years’ celebrating 25 years of Emma Bridgewater and ‘…and a five legged donkey’ celebrating 100 years of the Contemporary Art Society. We have put up activities for both of these on the museum website ‘Things To Do’ page. They are not strictly speaking ‘digital’ activities, but they will have a digital outcome eventually as we are going to display all contributions on the website.

Since then, we’ve held the selection process for Leave No Trace, and the exhibition is shaping up to be very interesting. It’s a shame we couldn’t accept more of the proposals because there were some great ideas, but space is limited and we have to select not just on the merits of individual pieces but also so that the exhibition works as a whole.

The next steps in preparing the exhibition are to compare costs with the funds available and talk to the Arts Council about the pieces we’d like to borrow from their collection. We’re also starting to think about the community elements of the exhibition, to involve a wide range of people in different ways, but with a few high-quality events rather than stretch ourselves too thinly and give people a poor introduction to digital art.

Perhaps this could be the start of a new way for the museum and art gallery to work with local artists, keeping in touch more closely with what’s going on in the area and discussing ways to improve the activities and events at the museum to encourage more people to take part in different ways.

• computer art and cybernetics
• computer art and time
• computer art and space
• computer art and output
• computer art and technocultures

Starting the following day is the two-day conference at the V&A on Decoding the Digital. Bonnie Mitchell, one of the speakers at the symposium, will also be talking in Brighton on 2nd February on Interactive Art Environments and Experimental Animation. There’s suddenly so much going on – it’s a shame it’s all down south. Or do you know of things away from the capital?

Anyway, there’s another meeting tonight at 5pm at the Burslem School of Art. If you’re on our mailing list, you should have received an e-mail reminder of this recently. Tonight’s meeting will have less of a clear agenda than the last meeting. Its main purpose is a general discussion of progress and ideas – more of a chance to catch up and ask any questions that may have arisen since the previous meeting.

I can’t promise to post on this blog quite as much as I did before Christmas, but I’ve been accumulating a list of links to interesting digital and multimedia activities, so perhaps for the next few weeks, this blog may become more of a referral site.

Remember, if you find anything you think is relevant or intersting to the Leave No Trace exhibition or the people involved in one way or another, feel free to add a post on this blog. (You’ll have to register first, if you haven’t already done so.)

Hope to see you this afternoon/evening.