Last weekend I had the pleasure of taking a lady friend to the ‘Decode: Digital Design Sensations’ exhibition at the V&A Museum in London. On arrival, my sister called me, asking if I had time for a chat. I, rather smugly, informed her I was on a date so couldn’t talk. After the call, my ‘date’ curtly informed me that we were not actually on a date at all. #epicfail. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the first disappointment of my afternoon.
The exhibition was put on by the V&A in partnership with onedotzero, a contemporary arts organization working to promote innovation across all forms of moving image and interactive arts. It was billed as an exploration of three separate themes: code, interactivity and network.
On entry, we found ourselves walking through an almost magical pathway of long, grass-like tubes coming up from the ground. The tops of the tubes would light up and make cricket-like noises as though we were strolling through a romantic field of the future. I brushed my hand over the top of the long stems, to find myself slightly disappointed that the lights and sounds didn’t seem to react to my movement. However, the next piece that grabbed my attention certainly made up for that.
Touch, sound and movement sensitive screens
The exhibit showed a picture of Thom Yorke (singer of Radiohead) on a touch sensitive screen. James Frost is to take credit for this interactive creation, which allows users to vary the angle and magnification of the image that they are viewing. What you can’t experience by reading this is the subtle oozing out of House of Cards, one of Radiohead’s recent tracks.
I then noticed a small boy burping into another screen. He seemed to have realized what some of the adults around him had not, which was that the screen in front of him reacted to the sounds he made – almost as though the noises coming out of his mouth were transfiguring into splodges of paint and then falling onto the screen.
Out of the rest, we saw a few shocking ‘pieces’, one of which claimed to have been based on a complex algorithm which crawled the web for works like “happiness” and then returned images which were highly aligned to the term. All this seemed to have returned was a picture of some z-list celebrity. I touched the screen in the vain hope that I could somehow make her face distort - it didn’t work. I did a burp, to see if a splodge would appear – it did not. I turned around to see a few people looking at me strangely, before spotting something that looked much more interesting…
A woman was picking up a hairdryer from a stand, and pointing it at a lovely image of a dandelion. As she moved the hairdryer around, the seeds flew off in the direction she was pointing. Not only was this a very satisfying act to undertake, it was also a beautiful and large image to engage with. Good work YOKE.
This was alongside another interactive piece, which involved a large screen, segmented into small squares, in front of a digital video camera and a smaller touch screen. Placing your finger on any of the segments on the smaller screen caused a countdown to appear and, before you realized it, you were being recorded for about 3 seconds. The recording then replayed endlessly on the bigger screen.
One other piece we enjoyed was a large ‘painting’ in front of a stool. The audience-cum-artists were invited to sit on the stool and watch the image of the predecessor slowly fade away while theirs slowly took over. Spooky.
But is this what we want out of art?
We left feeling slightly unsure of exactly what we had got out of the exhibition. There is no doubt that there were some really innovative setups here, and that the motion sensing equipment had been merged really well with the variety of image creation mechanisms. It was also interesting to see such a ‘fresh’ take on art, giving users the opportunity to create their own pieces through interaction.
It made me think about Facebook, and how successful they have been just by creating a mechanism for other people to create content. Many of the pieces we had seen took this exact approach – with less of a focus on the creation of a final piece, but rather on the creation of a mechanism which, in turn, would then allow for the individuals to create their own art.
This made me go back to basics and consider what it is about art which is so alluring to an audience. It occurred to me that I didn’t really go to an exhibition to see myself on a screen, or to see clever technical installations react to my movements and burps. The real allure of art, for me, is the ability to see the inside workings of the creator’s mind. As with any form of creativity, be it songwriting, poetry or architecture, the real value comes from seeing the creator’s confident expression of personality and vision.
In my opinion, the concept of user-generated art through technical facilitation seemed to miss a chord. While it appealed to the child in me that wanted to touch, feel, move, and contribute, I left without the feeling of inspiration which I would usually associate with a successful afternoon of culture.
Mind you, I may just have been in a huff about my ‘date’.
Decode is at the V&A to April 11