Decode: Digital Design Sensations is currently running at the V&A in London until April 11th. I’ve been waiting to see this in person, as one of the themes is Network, before I wrote anything about it here. I finally got around to seeing the exhibition yesterday so here goes.

First off let me state that the exhibition is clearly not aimed at somebody like myself. Onedotzero, known for their events / publications in the world of motion graphics / visual communications, curate the event with a certain awkwardness for me. It feels like a new media art exhibition or major event with some big international artists such as Golan Levin, Daniel Rozin, Ryoji Ikeda and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer but then there are a handful of relative unknowns and a few designers and agencies who are well respected in various design disciplines. This (and again I state for me) creates an odd combination of work which all sits under three loosely connected themes of Code, Interactivity and Network. The justification for the themes in the catalog is as follows:

Decode looks at three current themes within digital design: Code shows how computer code, whether bespoke and tailored, or hacked and shared, has become a new design tool; Interactivity presents works that respond to our physical presence; Network charts or reworks the traces we leave behind.

Reading the catalog and short descriptions of the works as I went around I noticed that emphasis seemed to be placed on the artist, their research, work, where they have exhibited and sometimes the software employed in the works creation with no real depth about the works concept. While design features in the exhibitions title the use of the words art / design and artists / designers are used interchangeably.

The interview of Golan Levin for the exhibition does help to ‘save’ some aspects of the exhibition. Golan draws a chronology from Cybernetic Serendipity to Decode explaining that computer artists, what we now generally call new media artists, are a dying breed due to the use of computers across art, design and media:

In the last few years, boosted by the creation of new programming tools made for artists, such as Processing and Flash, this number has grown to several hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile, previous artforms such as film, video, animation, sculpture and even painting have slowly incorporated the computer as an essential tool. It is — almost — no longer meaningful to refer to oneself as a computer artist; we are all computer artists now. The artists in this exhibition at the V&A are perhaps in the last generation of people who could call ourselves this, before the term becomes meaningless. Our works are concerned, very specifically, with the social implications of computing technologies (technoculturalism) and the aesthetic potential of generative software (techoformalism). Soon, hopefully, we will all just be ‘artists’ again.

So who is this exhibition aimed at and is it any good? It’s aimed at primarily those who are new to new media and if you attend on a week day you’ll notice that this largely constitutes schools, colleges and students. For this audience the exhibition works very well as a first step in this area. Accessing the works is easy for young and old. Selection of interactive works has prioritised simple interactions which give highly visual, immediately reactive (excluding Venetian Mirror) and easily interpreted responses. I’ll be taking a bus of students to this in March and fell confident they’ll get a lot out of it.

Below are some of my photos of works in the exhibition.

Everyone Forever (image above) by Universal Everything. I quite liked this work, primarily as it had an element of the work of the Vasulkas in it, but I would have liked to have seen it presented on a bigger screen or projected.

Data.scan (image above) by Ryoji Ikeda which premiered last September at Surrey Art Gallery in Canada.

Dandelion (image above) by Sennep, a London interactive webdesign studio, was fun to play with but as a friend mentioned to me before the exhibition this seemed slightly derivative of some other more know works.

Weave Mirror (image above) by Daniel Rozin.

Audience (image above) by Chris O’Shea.

Mirror Mirror (image above) by Jason Bruges. This was one of a few works outside the exhibition hall which could be seen for free and in fact was the only work outdoors braving the English weather in the John Madejski Garden.

Videogrid (image above) by Ross Phillips was a work I shouldn’t have liked but proved very popular with those the exhibition was designed for, in this instance school kids. It was quite interesting to watch them battle for control of the camera and their 5 seconds of looped video on screen.

Below are excerpt videos from some of he works in the exhibition.