Digital Revolution, Barbican Centre, London
This joyful celebration of the impact digital technology has had on art and creativity highlights some of the challenges of displaying the subject, writes Danny Birchall
Digital technology offers museums a plethora of problems. For a start, there’s the cost of digitising collections, and then there’s the battle to find an audience for them in the ever-more competitive “attention economy”.
On top of that, the art and culture that museums collect and exhibit no longer comes in the forms it used to. How do you make an exhibition out of media that’s been specifically designed for recording studios, computers and cinemas – in short, almost everywhere but in galleries?
The Barbican’s Digital Revolution exhibition is one answer to that last question. Curated by Conrad Bodman, whose 2002 Game On exhibition of arcade games is still touring, it’s a jumbled and joyful celebration of digitally-enabled creativity in all its forms, from internet art made in bedrooms to blockbuster movies.
It follows a path already beaten by the Barbican’s ongoing overtures to the local “tech city” in east London. Last year’s Hack the Barbican experiment and Seven on Seven conference brought together artists and technologists to collaborate on projects. Digital Revolution puts this sort of work in a larger historical context.
With crowded galleries and atmospheric lighting, the show packs as much as it can into the Curve space, with further manifestations in other parts of the Barbican. The opening section, Digital Archaeology, takes us back to the 1970s and the emergence of the personal computer as an artistic tool.
A Pac-Man cabinet and a Fairlight synthesizer sit alongside seminal early net.art works such as Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back From the War and Alexei Shulgin’s Form Art.
This section also demonstrates some of the difficulties of archiving and displaying digital works that are not yet even 30 years old.
Lovingly preserved original hardware has been used to present early video games such as Breakout, but the worldwide web’s first-ever page is lost to history, with not even a screenshot as documentation.
Creative Spaces raises the pitch with demonstrations of the high-powered CGI behind Hollywood hits such as Inception and Gravity, but is one of the less convincing parts of the show: its multiscreen presentations have something of the feel of a science centre.
We Create refocuses on the imagination in game worlds such as Minecraft, and Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin’s crowdsourced Johnny Cash Project.
Thoughtful works
Sound and Vision showcases the new wave of albums-as-apps typified by Björk’s Biophilia, but its centrepiece is the gloriously kitsch Pyramidi installation by US musician will.i.am and Yuri Suzuki. The animated eyes of the singer follow you around the room, as robotically reconfigured instruments accompany one of his tracks.
State of Play introduces what might be the most familiar form of digital art to museum-goers: interactive installations that invite you to participate using your own body. Milk’s The Treachery of Sanctuary, driven by a simple Microsoft Kinect, is haunting in the simplicity of its transfiguration.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s The Year’s Midnight turns sorrow and loss into a creepy kind of visual horror, and Umbrellium’s Assemblance takes over the Barbican’s Pit theatre for the full run of the exhibition, filling it with dry ice and laser-projected generative forms.
The Indie Games Space, located in the foyer, reminds us that video games are taking over the territory of arthouse cinema: the personal vision and meditative quality of games such as Journey and Proteus are far from the perpetual violence of Call of Duty.
Our Digital Futures looks at artists investigating the potential of wearable technology, from the haute couture of CuteCircuit’s Twitter-enabled dresses to Ruth Gibson and Bruno Martelli’s reimagination of first world war “dazzle ships” as camouflage for performers.
Perhaps the most controversial part of Digital Revolution is DevArt, a section sponsored by internet titan Google. Prominent digital artists including Karsten Schmidt and Zach Lieberman, together with the winner of an open competition, have created new artworks based on Google’s technical toolset.
Google’s original strapline for the project, “a new type of art made with code” is firmly contradicted by evidence in the exhibition itself: digital art has a considerable history, and there’s nothing new about computer programmers making art.
Critical distance?
A group of artists critical of Google’s attempt to step over the line from sponsor to curator have mounted an online exhibition, Hack the Artworld, which can only be seen by bringing your laptop or iPad to the Barbican itself.
While critical of Digital Revolution, the protest embodies the spirit of subversion seen in much of the work in the show.
The exhibition itself works if you’re prepared to surrender yourself to its slightly ahistorical excitability about the “revolution” of digital technology.
From the synth-pop medley that greets you at the entrance the tone is quickly set, and the underlit metallic gallery labels give you the impression that interpretation wasn’t foremost on the exhibition designers’ minds.
The larger works benefit from being in a slightly crowded gallery, which encourages interaction between strangers as much as interaction with the works. But some of the intimate power of smaller works, such as Lialina’s browser art, is lost.
James Bridle’s excellent critique of global surveillance and war, Dronestagram, is designed to be experienced as part of a social-media stream, but its impact is muted when seen alongside shallower but flashier works.
Digital Revolution’s refusal to erect a wall between art and other practices is in some ways an authentic representation of the history of digital creativity. The boundaries of the creative industries and the art world are especially porous when it comes to technology.
However, some of the potential for artists to critique the domination of digital technology by corporations such as Google has been lost in a colourful celebration of the power of digital technology to awe and entertain.
Danny Birchall is the digital manager at the Wellcome Collection, London
As the curator of Digital Revolution, it has been exciting for me to be able to commission a series of new works for the exhibition, an important investment in digital practice.
We commissioned Matt Pyke to make a new piece called Togetherness, which explores collaboration. Visitors are encouraged to create an animated loop that is showcased in a 24-screen public realm installation.
Umbrellium (Usman Haque and Dot Samsen) have created Assemblance, an installation that is shown in our Pit Theatre and allows visitors to sculpt with projected light and lasers.
In collaboration with Google we commissioned four new works by creative coders Zach Lieberman, Karsten Schmidt, Cyril Diagne, Béatrice Lartigue, Varvara Guljajeva, and Mar Canet Sola. The DevArt section has resulted in some awe-inspiring works. Play the World by Lieberman explores internet radio from around the world, which is linked to the keys of a keyboard, forming a central and iconic component to the installation.
Finally, we worked with the musician and technology entrepreneur will.i.am and the artist Yuri Suzuki on a new work called Pyramidi. A series of beautifully crafted automatic music machines play a new composition by will.i.am in front of an elegant animated backdrop designed by Pasha Shapiro.
The exhibition is the first I have curated that has had such a high level of interest on social media. In the first week we had 26 million exhibition-related tweets. We have allowed photography in the exhibition and established a fast wireless network to allow visitors easy interaction with social media. In the digital age it still seems like the analogue social experience of visiting an exhibition is still very much in demand.
The exhibition will travel to the Tekniska Museet in Stockholm before travelling to venues internationally.
Conrad Bodman is a museum and gallery consultant and the curator of Digital Revolution
On top of that, the art and culture that museums collect and exhibit no longer comes in the forms it used to. How do you make an exhibition out of media that’s been specifically designed for recording studios, computers and cinemas – in short, almost everywhere but in galleries?
The Barbican’s Digital Revolution exhibition is one answer to that last question. Curated by Conrad Bodman, whose 2002 Game On exhibition of arcade games is still touring, it’s a jumbled and joyful celebration of digitally-enabled creativity in all its forms, from internet art made in bedrooms to blockbuster movies.
It follows a path already beaten by the Barbican’s ongoing overtures to the local “tech city” in east London. Last year’s Hack the Barbican experiment and Seven on Seven conference brought together artists and technologists to collaborate on projects. Digital Revolution puts this sort of work in a larger historical context.
With crowded galleries and atmospheric lighting, the show packs as much as it can into the Curve space, with further manifestations in other parts of the Barbican. The opening section, Digital Archaeology, takes us back to the 1970s and the emergence of the personal computer as an artistic tool.
A Pac-Man cabinet and a Fairlight synthesizer sit alongside seminal early net.art works such as Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back From the War and Alexei Shulgin’s Form Art.
This section also demonstrates some of the difficulties of archiving and displaying digital works that are not yet even 30 years old.
Lovingly preserved original hardware has been used to present early video games such as Breakout, but the worldwide web’s first-ever page is lost to history, with not even a screenshot as documentation.
Creative Spaces raises the pitch with demonstrations of the high-powered CGI behind Hollywood hits such as Inception and Gravity, but is one of the less convincing parts of the show: its multiscreen presentations have something of the feel of a science centre.
We Create refocuses on the imagination in game worlds such as Minecraft, and Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin’s crowdsourced Johnny Cash Project.
Thoughtful works
Sound and Vision showcases the new wave of albums-as-apps typified by Björk’s Biophilia, but its centrepiece is the gloriously kitsch Pyramidi installation by US musician will.i.am and Yuri Suzuki. The animated eyes of the singer follow you around the room, as robotically reconfigured instruments accompany one of his tracks.
State of Play introduces what might be the most familiar form of digital art to museum-goers: interactive installations that invite you to participate using your own body. Milk’s The Treachery of Sanctuary, driven by a simple Microsoft Kinect, is haunting in the simplicity of its transfiguration.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s The Year’s Midnight turns sorrow and loss into a creepy kind of visual horror, and Umbrellium’s Assemblance takes over the Barbican’s Pit theatre for the full run of the exhibition, filling it with dry ice and laser-projected generative forms.
The Indie Games Space, located in the foyer, reminds us that video games are taking over the territory of arthouse cinema: the personal vision and meditative quality of games such as Journey and Proteus are far from the perpetual violence of Call of Duty.
Our Digital Futures looks at artists investigating the potential of wearable technology, from the haute couture of CuteCircuit’s Twitter-enabled dresses to Ruth Gibson and Bruno Martelli’s reimagination of first world war “dazzle ships” as camouflage for performers.
Perhaps the most controversial part of Digital Revolution is DevArt, a section sponsored by internet titan Google. Prominent digital artists including Karsten Schmidt and Zach Lieberman, together with the winner of an open competition, have created new artworks based on Google’s technical toolset.
Google’s original strapline for the project, “a new type of art made with code” is firmly contradicted by evidence in the exhibition itself: digital art has a considerable history, and there’s nothing new about computer programmers making art.
Critical distance?
A group of artists critical of Google’s attempt to step over the line from sponsor to curator have mounted an online exhibition, Hack the Artworld, which can only be seen by bringing your laptop or iPad to the Barbican itself.
While critical of Digital Revolution, the protest embodies the spirit of subversion seen in much of the work in the show.
The exhibition itself works if you’re prepared to surrender yourself to its slightly ahistorical excitability about the “revolution” of digital technology.
From the synth-pop medley that greets you at the entrance the tone is quickly set, and the underlit metallic gallery labels give you the impression that interpretation wasn’t foremost on the exhibition designers’ minds.
The larger works benefit from being in a slightly crowded gallery, which encourages interaction between strangers as much as interaction with the works. But some of the intimate power of smaller works, such as Lialina’s browser art, is lost.
James Bridle’s excellent critique of global surveillance and war, Dronestagram, is designed to be experienced as part of a social-media stream, but its impact is muted when seen alongside shallower but flashier works.
Digital Revolution’s refusal to erect a wall between art and other practices is in some ways an authentic representation of the history of digital creativity. The boundaries of the creative industries and the art world are especially porous when it comes to technology.
However, some of the potential for artists to critique the domination of digital technology by corporations such as Google has been lost in a colourful celebration of the power of digital technology to awe and entertain.
Danny Birchall is the digital manager at the Wellcome Collection, London
Focus on... Commissioning new work
As the curator of Digital Revolution, it has been exciting for me to be able to commission a series of new works for the exhibition, an important investment in digital practice.
We commissioned Matt Pyke to make a new piece called Togetherness, which explores collaboration. Visitors are encouraged to create an animated loop that is showcased in a 24-screen public realm installation.
Umbrellium (Usman Haque and Dot Samsen) have created Assemblance, an installation that is shown in our Pit Theatre and allows visitors to sculpt with projected light and lasers.
In collaboration with Google we commissioned four new works by creative coders Zach Lieberman, Karsten Schmidt, Cyril Diagne, Béatrice Lartigue, Varvara Guljajeva, and Mar Canet Sola. The DevArt section has resulted in some awe-inspiring works. Play the World by Lieberman explores internet radio from around the world, which is linked to the keys of a keyboard, forming a central and iconic component to the installation.
Finally, we worked with the musician and technology entrepreneur will.i.am and the artist Yuri Suzuki on a new work called Pyramidi. A series of beautifully crafted automatic music machines play a new composition by will.i.am in front of an elegant animated backdrop designed by Pasha Shapiro.
The exhibition is the first I have curated that has had such a high level of interest on social media. In the first week we had 26 million exhibition-related tweets. We have allowed photography in the exhibition and established a fast wireless network to allow visitors easy interaction with social media. In the digital age it still seems like the analogue social experience of visiting an exhibition is still very much in demand.
The exhibition will travel to the Tekniska Museet in Stockholm before travelling to venues internationally.
Conrad Bodman is a museum and gallery consultant and the curator of Digital Revolution
Project data
- Cost undisclosed
- Sponsor Bloomberg
- Commissioning partners Google; Lexus
- Supporter Technology Strategy Board
- Creator/producer Barbican International Enterprises
- Curator Conrad Bodman
- Exhibition design AB Rogers; 59 Productions
- Exhibition ends 14 September