- Venue
- Millennium Gallery
- Location
- Yorkshire
I went to see the Code:Craft exhibition at the Millennium Galleries in Sheffield last week. After the Decode exhibition at V&A it was a little disappointing, but I’m guessing that the budgets were completely different.
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.’
[http://2010.lovebytes.org.uk/event.php?ref=1010]
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.
