Decode – Digital art at the V&A

Published by Davina | Filed under Post

On Friday night I went to the Decode: Digital Design Sensations exhibition at the V&A museum.  Decode bills itself as showcasing “the latest developments in digital and interactive design, from small, screen-based, graphics to large-scale interactive installations.” and on the whole it lives up to this.

The exhibition begins with an interactive light and sound installation – lights shaped like reeds that react as you walk through them. It was fun, and interactive, and a great introduction to the exhibit. The next part was devoted to artworks rendered by code, graphical representations of mathematical algorythms and live infographics. All quite pretty, but a number of them were on small 19 inch screens set into walls that required visitors to be up close and personal, and viewable by only 1 or 2 people at a time. These pieces would have been much more impressive if displayed at a larger scale, or projected onto larger spaces.

The rest of the exhibit was dedicated to interactive pieces. My favourite exhibit was called Oasis – a lightbox covered in sand that acted like a pond. Shifting the sand around caused AI fish and amoebas to appear that grew and swam around. Fun, cute and a great way to get people interacting. I did however think it needed to have a bit more colour – black fish/amoebas on a white background covered in black sand meant that sometimes the little fish/amoebas got missed. Colour would help them standout and perhaps create more visual feedback, for example changing colours the longer the fish has been in existance.

It was also a shame that some of the bigger interactive pieces were either away being repaired, or not functioning correctly on the night.  One of the perils on these types of works is that technology tends to be fragile. Things break, programs crash or freeze or sometimes they stop working for no reason.

Despite that it was still a good exhibit overall. I would have liked it to be bigger, to have more works but for £5 I’m not going to complain. I’d definitely recommend it as worthwhile, especially for the varying styles of interaction on show and also for the sheer novelty factor of being in a venue like the V&A for such a nerdy show!

Edited 11/02

It has been brought to my attention that the Decode exhibition was actually done as a joint collaboration between the V&A and onedotzero, a digital arts organisation. onedotzero look like they’re doing some interesting stuff, so go check them out.