Digital Art

Postgraduate study in the creative arts and design can be an interesting and stimulating experience. Stephen Boyd Davis, Head of Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts at Middlesex University, is involved in new developments in this field. Stephen talks to Hotcourses about new digital and interactive media and discusses their influence on how we engage with art, entertainment and information…

 

Media used to be easy to define: it took familiar, usually rectangular, forms like television, newspapers, books, radio or the cinema screen. But what happens when media become digital? How does that affect our experience as viewers or listeners, as ‘consumers’ of media? What kinds of new media experiences can we construct that never existed before? 

 

Creative space

Technologists have the answers to some of these questions, but so do artists, designers, composers and other creative people working at the leading edge of innovation. They are creating dramas revealed by moving about a space, games that are powered by where you walk and even by your heart-rate, music and soundscapes that depend on the colour of your surroundings, buildings that sound like instruments, and many more. 

 

In case any of this seems like some weird, fringe activity, it’s worth noting how often pioneering ideas become mainstream. A video of experimentalist Myron Kreuger back in the 1980s shows him controlling images and other media using hand gestures – these have only recently started to appear in the multi-touch displays of Apple, Microsoft and other companies. Computer animation, a field in which the UK still excels, owes its origins as much to the art school as the computer lab. Keith Waters was one such pioneer in the Lansdown Centre at Middlesex University, creating the first facial animation to use computer models of underlying muscle structures in the late 1980s.

 

Sharing content 

Media has become ubiquitous, portable, personal, multi-modal and social. One of the liberating aspects of new technologies is how easily users can create and share their own content. In social interactive media like Facebook and YouTube interacting with other people around media is as important as interacting with media content itself. But there are more ways in which the relation between the user and the media is changing. 

 

Every film viewer can have their own viewing experience in their own time and place thanks to portable, personal players. What’s more, their environment can make its own input to the experience: I can view the street around me and see overlaid on it links to all the internet information available about the objects and places in view and even the location of all my friends. These radical changes raise questions, such as whether we can find media silence: how easy will it be to turn off, tune out and engage with unmediated reality? 

 

Pushing boundaries

Artist and researcher Ralf Nuhn at the Lansdown Centre has been grappling with these issues of virtuality intruding into the real. A series of exhibits explores how far he can confuse viewers’ sense of the boundary between the two. In one case, viewers can control a real electric fan which seems to cause the imagery on screen to bend in the resulting breeze; in another, a pressure-sensitive device in the real world causes an on-screen character to blow bubbles – but the bubbles appear in a real flask of water. 

 

Ralf and his collaborator Cécile Colle have recently created Parasites, in which the girders of a deserted building in Paris are made to resonate through the tapping of tiny moving electronic gadgets clinging to the surface. The dead building is brought alive, parasitically, through sound. The environment is the media.

 

In Ere be Dragons, it is the inner life of the user, or player, that makes the difference. Specifically, it is their heartbeat. As players move about, their changing location is combined with their heart-rate to affect the outcome of the game. There is something special about these methods of location-sensing and bio-sensing: they don’t require the user or player to do anything explicit, such as click a mouse, press a button or push a joystick. Everything happens seamlessly as a result of how they move and how their body responds. Once they play the game, players become fascinated with the responses of their own body and never have to think about the technology itself. This is an important shift from the kinds of interaction we have with a PC or even a television, where every user action has to be deliberate and intended. It is another of the ways in which the interactive and the digital are changing how we understand media experience. 

 

 

 

Sound interaction

There are more ways that media can now respond to the world. In Ludus by the Lansdown Centre’s Nye Parry, eight saxophonists played in the passages of Colourscape, a giant coloured labyrinth. The musicians carried colour sensors designed by Nye’s colleague Nic Sandiland, triggering electronic changes to the music on the fly. 

 

Nic Sandiland is now creating a dance which takes place on a continuously moving, tilting floor using hydraulic pistons controlled by a hidden computer for the Arts Council. It all seems far away from dance neatly boxed-in by the proscenium of a theatre.

 

Even traditional broadcasters are interested in the new possibilities. Nye joined Helen Bendon, Magnus Moar and Stephen Boyd Davis of the Lansdown Centre in a project with the BBC, searching out new ways to explore drama in the changing media landscape. In Scratch, written by Penelope Skinner, instead of experiencing drama via the radio, each listener makes their own exploration wearing headphones. As they move about, different aspects of the story unfold. 

 

Designing the soundworld and the exact form of the interaction, and above all making the narrative both responsive and gripping – these are challenges that require a complete blend of technological understanding and artistic judgement and, once again, teamwork. 

 

Future media

Taking familiar media and simply making them digital does not in itself tend to produce anything interesting. Back in the 1990s book-publishers leapt on the CD-ROM, spent millions, and made dull products no one really wanted. Many early websites were little different from a booklet or magazine. But once creative people get to grips with technologies they can create something truly new. Working across disciplines, artists, designers, composers, programmers and experts in interaction together have the skills to put their ideas into practice and to foresee what might be possible. 

 

 

 

About Stephen Boyd Davis

Stephen Boyd Davis is Director of Middlesex University’s Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, which focuses on interdisciplinary work in digital media. As well as developing multi-media innovations and projects, Stephen’s work involves setting new media practices in wider historical contexts. His aim is to explore the possibilities of media and technologies, exploiting their special properties to the full. Stephen is currently acting head of Middlesex’s Art and Design Research Institute. 

 

 

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