Delving into digital

More people now have access to the core of what we call digital art, both as audiences and for their own work. The development of programming tools has been focused on creating more accessible environments, meaning that the tools are now available for more arts-oriented practitioners. Creative use of high-level programming languages and object-oriented software environments has grown quickly. At the Sheffield-based Lovebytes Festival, we are certainly seeing more people explore creatively and delve into the realms of digital art. Advances in technology are allowing designers and artists to take their work to new levels and crash through old boundaries, and we are witnessing an increasingly sophisticated audience with an appetite for new work.

Generative systems

Creative people are now building software-based systems to explore patterns and behaviours in complex forms. Artists can create their own systems to follow a set of rules for the automated generation of sound or visual work, creating graphical animation, sound art and multi-media installations. Such systems also allow for live data to influence the work, emulating environments and complex systems. This could be anything from stock market statistics to weather data from the Arctic Circle. For example, we used a generative system to create our publicity for the Lovebytes Festival in 2007. We commissioned the designer Matt Pyke at Universal Everything to create an ident which resulted in 20,000 individual postcards, each with a unique set of characteristics. The resulting ‘monster’ faces were each generated from a ‘seed’ containing a set of parameters which denoted characteristics such as colour and hair length, and also generated their names and individual issue numbers. These were printed using a ‘variable data’ digital press and mailed out to our postal database. In effect, everyone received an individual piece of digital artwork. In terms of marketing and audience development, these friendly-faced monsters created quite a stir in the press and appealed to a new audience who subsequently came to digital art events for the first time. The project itself is now being exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of ‘Design and the Elastic Mind’.  [[Advances in technology are allowing designers and artists to take their work to new levels and crash through old boundaries]]

Open source systems

What could help to develop creative digital work more than freely accessible, legal software tools? We have these already in the form of open source systems based on Linux operating systems. In 2008, we are running a workshop with GOTO10 using ‘pure:dyne’, a system that will capture and edit video using a chain of tools, all of which are free. pure:dyne comes with a suite of creative tools for the live manipulation of digital media including sound, video and images. We would like to see Linux being used more in schools, giving access to a host of powerful and inspiring tools, legally and free of charge, and exciting the digitally creative thinkers of new generations. It may still be early days for open source in terms of the wider market, but the momentum is very strong. This is something Lovebytes will support and follow closely.

The digital/mainstream interface

Now ‘everything is digital’, artists use the internet for creativity and innovation of all kinds – be that traditional craft, live performance or distributed media such as film or photography. We have been using the internet as a tool for developing projects and events, reaching out globally since 1994. You could ask, ‘who needs the mainstream art world?’ Well, we are very keen to engage the art world, and the common interface would be the gallery, cinema, schools and, more broadly, public spaces. Lovebytes exists as a physical meeting place, and, as an art ‘brand’, we provide a point of reference for people and other arts organisations wanting to engage with digital art.

We develop our audiences through our partnerships and collaborations with ‘mainstream’ arts organisations and by locating activity in contemporary art spaces and public venues. Two hugely successful projects for us in 2007 saw hundreds of people following a trail of digital activity, from the basement studio of the Showroom Cinema, where Haswell and Hecker performed their ‘UPIC Diffusion Session #9’, through Sheffield’s Winter Garden for Biosphere’s ‘Does Music Affect Plants?’ sound installation and then on to the Central Library to see Yasunao Tone performing his digital interpretation of Japanese calligraphy.

We are working to find better representation for digital work in mainstream galleries. We have worked with a number of Sheffield’s major public venues and we find there is a lot of interest in developing digital work. Any reticence is due to the unknowns, such as audience perception of the work and practical issues of using public spaces. But generally people in Sheffield are willing to give things a try; it seems innovation and experimentation is infectious here, and the city has rightfully developed a culture and a reputation for this kind of work.