Danny Birchall explores contemporary digital art and our relationship with technology in this absorbing show
Contemporary digital culture is an anxious one. Social media demands the constant, real-time sculpting of a public self. State and supermarkets alike track you in their insatiable thirst for data, while algorithms threaten to replace middle-class jobs just as robots once decimated production lines. We are always right here, right now: posing for a selfie, spied on by our phones or justifying our existence. How can we step back and get a better sense of our own relationship to technology?
Right Here, Right Now, an exhibition of digital art, is one possible way. “Here” is The Lowry, a millennium-era public arts centre on Salford Quays, opposite Media City UK: a post-industrial landscape transformed by the new media economy. “Now” is early 2016, when for a change we aren’t short of ambitious digital exhibitions, including Big Bang Data at Somerset House in London (until 28 February), and Electronic Superhighway (2016-1966) at London’s Whitechapel Gallery (until 15 May). Right Here, Right Now uses the state of digital art to explore our digital condition.
The show’s curator, Lucy Dusgate, invited other curators and researchers to suggest the 16 artists in the exhibition, which is in The Lowry’s relatively small temporary exhibition galleries. The first work you encounter is Julie Freeman’s We Need Us, a screen of shifting shapes and sounds driven in real time by metadata derived from crowdsourced “citizen” science projects. The shapes and sounds give no meaning to the data itself: it’s the opposite of an infographic. But the suggestion that there is a quiet, contemplative aspect to torrents of data is one that recurs throughout the show.
In this mode, Ed Carter’s Barographic uses the architecture and variations in atmospheric pressure of The Lowry itself to generate an audiovisual composition reflecting the rhythms of the building.
Thomson and Craighead’s work, Stutterer, also functions using data, playing an archive of video clips from between 1990 and 2003 that adopts the human genome as a score – a process that will not finish until 2080. It calls attention both to the awe- inspiring scale of the Human Genome Project that translated life into data and to the particular period during which the genome was decoded, the era of Nelson Mandela and George Bush.
Immersive displays
Data plays out in static images as well as on moving screens. A More Perfect Union by R. Luke Dubois doctors large-format maps of the US to represent data from online dating profiles. Felicity Hammond’s carefully layered landscape montage and Mishka Henner’s large-scale recomposition of satellite photographs both use digital technology to create physically imposing, if oblique, representations of landscapes transformed by powerful social and industrial processes.
In Timo Arnall’s immersive three-screen video installation, Internet Machine, a camera roams the eerily deserted corridors of a Spanish data centre – a reminder that our ubiquitous internet cloud is somewhere strangely real.
In Robert Henke’s Destructive Observation Field a laser beam warps and destroys a black plastic sheet, creating beautiful patterns, though the connection between the two seems strained. Joe Hamilton’s Regular Division is a looping, overlapping video composition of greenhouse architecture overlaid with detached impressionist brush strokes. A companion work, Indirect Flights, uses fragments of buildings and satellite imagery similarly, but is only available online.
The generally two-dimensional aesthetic of the works is offset by a couple that physically manifest digital mechanics. Nicki Pugh’s slug-like plywood robotic creatures, entitled Colony, are designed to respond to their location via GPS signals and replay a recent trip around Salford Quays, as they flex and twitch uneasily. Nearby, the Wi-Fi-enabled suspended pot plants of Stephanie Rothenberg’s Planthropy react directly to online philanthropy: each plant’s watering system is activated when donations to good causes (refugees, animal rights, cancer care) are mentioned on Twitter.
Human element
Though interaction is implicit in many of these works, it is minimal with visitors. Two larger-scale works, by contrast, are familiar as “digital mirrors” that reflect a visitor’s image back to them in wall-sized projections. Daniel Rozin’s Darwinian Straw Mirror uses an evolutionary drawing algorithm to paint a portrait of the viewer in ever-shorter “straws”. And Snow Fall by fuse* captures only a silhouette, with drifting digital snowflakes gradually gathering to give the outline more detail. Both these works reward stillness rather than action. But a more intimate form of participation is requested by Branger_briz’s A Charge for Privacy, which invites you to charge your phone for free in exchange for access to your photographs.
Finally, two artists explore the most human implications of networked culture. Eva and Franco Mattes’ work, Emily’s Video, tracks the reactions of viewers watching “the worst video ever”. We never see the video itself, only the viewers’ laughter, tears and revulsion, but also ourselves as voyeurs, reflected back in the dark portion of the monitor. And Elly Clarke’s series of video and performance works featuring her drag queen alter ego #Sergina, are both light- hearted and disturbing as playful takes on pop video aesthetics and our fluid personas. Clarke uses the ways that physical desire is always intensely present, even as the desiring bodies themselves are separated and mediated by digital networks.
Audible experience
Sound plays a surprisingly important role in the exhibition: aurally, the experience of visiting is one of slipping between one ambient soundscape and another, an impression that only begins to break down with the jagged utterances of Stutterer, or when donning headphones and entering the worlds of Clarke and the Mattes duo.
In some ways the ability of artists working with technology to create immersive and reflective experiences is reassuring; a necessary counterpoint to an anxious digital culture. But the cushioning effect of aesthetics can itself be as disempowering as anxiety. Works in this exhibition look closely at powerful forces, yet nothing is frightening or issuing a call to arms.
As a survey, Right Here, Right Now is more than robust, representing both the computational and conceptual power at work in the field (a female curatorial team contributes to an absence of macho digital posturing). It’s also a beautiful show, testament to the ability of algorithms as well as artists to create harmony.
Digital art is hardly in its infancy, but perhaps the time is yet to come when discordancy and disruption are found as commonly in digital art as in other contemporary art.
Danny Birchall is the digital manager at the Wellcome Collection, London
Cost £90,000
Main funders Arts Council England; Salford City Council
Technical fit-out and contractors in-house
Audiovisual programme Dave Lynch; Lowry staff
Exhibition ends 28 February
Admission Free
Contemporary digital culture is an anxious one. Social media demands the constant, real-time sculpting of a public self. State and supermarkets alike track you in their insatiable thirst for data, while algorithms threaten to replace middle-class jobs just as robots once decimated production lines. We are always right here, right now: posing for a selfie, spied on by our phones or justifying our existence. How can we step back and get a better sense of our own relationship to technology?
Right Here, Right Now, an exhibition of digital art, is one possible way. “Here” is The Lowry, a millennium-era public arts centre on Salford Quays, opposite Media City UK: a post-industrial landscape transformed by the new media economy. “Now” is early 2016, when for a change we aren’t short of ambitious digital exhibitions, including Big Bang Data at Somerset House in London (until 28 February), and Electronic Superhighway (2016-1966) at London’s Whitechapel Gallery (until 15 May). Right Here, Right Now uses the state of digital art to explore our digital condition.
The show’s curator, Lucy Dusgate, invited other curators and researchers to suggest the 16 artists in the exhibition, which is in The Lowry’s relatively small temporary exhibition galleries. The first work you encounter is Julie Freeman’s We Need Us, a screen of shifting shapes and sounds driven in real time by metadata derived from crowdsourced “citizen” science projects. The shapes and sounds give no meaning to the data itself: it’s the opposite of an infographic. But the suggestion that there is a quiet, contemplative aspect to torrents of data is one that recurs throughout the show.
In this mode, Ed Carter’s Barographic uses the architecture and variations in atmospheric pressure of The Lowry itself to generate an audiovisual composition reflecting the rhythms of the building.
Thomson and Craighead’s work, Stutterer, also functions using data, playing an archive of video clips from between 1990 and 2003 that adopts the human genome as a score – a process that will not finish until 2080. It calls attention both to the awe- inspiring scale of the Human Genome Project that translated life into data and to the particular period during which the genome was decoded, the era of Nelson Mandela and George Bush.
Immersive displays
Data plays out in static images as well as on moving screens. A More Perfect Union by R. Luke Dubois doctors large-format maps of the US to represent data from online dating profiles. Felicity Hammond’s carefully layered landscape montage and Mishka Henner’s large-scale recomposition of satellite photographs both use digital technology to create physically imposing, if oblique, representations of landscapes transformed by powerful social and industrial processes.
In Timo Arnall’s immersive three-screen video installation, Internet Machine, a camera roams the eerily deserted corridors of a Spanish data centre – a reminder that our ubiquitous internet cloud is somewhere strangely real.
In Robert Henke’s Destructive Observation Field a laser beam warps and destroys a black plastic sheet, creating beautiful patterns, though the connection between the two seems strained. Joe Hamilton’s Regular Division is a looping, overlapping video composition of greenhouse architecture overlaid with detached impressionist brush strokes. A companion work, Indirect Flights, uses fragments of buildings and satellite imagery similarly, but is only available online.
The generally two-dimensional aesthetic of the works is offset by a couple that physically manifest digital mechanics. Nicki Pugh’s slug-like plywood robotic creatures, entitled Colony, are designed to respond to their location via GPS signals and replay a recent trip around Salford Quays, as they flex and twitch uneasily. Nearby, the Wi-Fi-enabled suspended pot plants of Stephanie Rothenberg’s Planthropy react directly to online philanthropy: each plant’s watering system is activated when donations to good causes (refugees, animal rights, cancer care) are mentioned on Twitter.
Human element
Though interaction is implicit in many of these works, it is minimal with visitors. Two larger-scale works, by contrast, are familiar as “digital mirrors” that reflect a visitor’s image back to them in wall-sized projections. Daniel Rozin’s Darwinian Straw Mirror uses an evolutionary drawing algorithm to paint a portrait of the viewer in ever-shorter “straws”. And Snow Fall by fuse* captures only a silhouette, with drifting digital snowflakes gradually gathering to give the outline more detail. Both these works reward stillness rather than action. But a more intimate form of participation is requested by Branger_briz’s A Charge for Privacy, which invites you to charge your phone for free in exchange for access to your photographs.
Finally, two artists explore the most human implications of networked culture. Eva and Franco Mattes’ work, Emily’s Video, tracks the reactions of viewers watching “the worst video ever”. We never see the video itself, only the viewers’ laughter, tears and revulsion, but also ourselves as voyeurs, reflected back in the dark portion of the monitor. And Elly Clarke’s series of video and performance works featuring her drag queen alter ego #Sergina, are both light- hearted and disturbing as playful takes on pop video aesthetics and our fluid personas. Clarke uses the ways that physical desire is always intensely present, even as the desiring bodies themselves are separated and mediated by digital networks.
Audible experience
Sound plays a surprisingly important role in the exhibition: aurally, the experience of visiting is one of slipping between one ambient soundscape and another, an impression that only begins to break down with the jagged utterances of Stutterer, or when donning headphones and entering the worlds of Clarke and the Mattes duo.
In some ways the ability of artists working with technology to create immersive and reflective experiences is reassuring; a necessary counterpoint to an anxious digital culture. But the cushioning effect of aesthetics can itself be as disempowering as anxiety. Works in this exhibition look closely at powerful forces, yet nothing is frightening or issuing a call to arms.
As a survey, Right Here, Right Now is more than robust, representing both the computational and conceptual power at work in the field (a female curatorial team contributes to an absence of macho digital posturing). It’s also a beautiful show, testament to the ability of algorithms as well as artists to create harmony.
Digital art is hardly in its infancy, but perhaps the time is yet to come when discordancy and disruption are found as commonly in digital art as in other contemporary art.
Danny Birchall is the digital manager at the Wellcome Collection, London
Project data
Cost £90,000
Main funders Arts Council England; Salford City Council
Technical fit-out and contractors in-house
Audiovisual programme Dave Lynch; Lowry staff
Exhibition ends 28 February
Admission Free