Arts – Page 59 – Hannah Nicklin

You can watch in yummy 720p from my new Canon Ixus 100is, ^_^

Last Friday I went to the Digital Design Sensations exhibition at the V&A Museum. The video picks out the pieces that interested me most, and the ones that I thought were the most successful – I’ll let the video do the describing for me, other than that, I just wanted to note main observations I came away with:

1) At what point does tech become art? The answer to that is probably something facetious, like ‘when it’s put in a gallery’, or ‘when an artist is involved in making it’, but I did feel a lot of the beginning pieces (not filmed) felt more like screensavers/music visualisations, than pieces of art. Why can’t a screen saver be a piece of art? No reason, I suppose that’s my own prejudices talking – I’m used to seeing that style of thing as ubiquitous ‘filler’ material, not the focal point. It was, I think, the reasons behind or the data informing the code which did make it art. In the same way paint is just paint until you let information express through it. Something to think on, certainly.

2) Unintuitive interaction is worse than no interaction. A lot of the stuff in that room just didn’t work well enough. Take the rotating singing head (after the rotating words in the video) it was interesting to choose what angle, inside or out, that you viewed a sculpture (very phenomenological) but as a regular touch screen user I was incredibly disappointed when I couldn’t pinch zoom, change the movement with the speed of my gesture, rotate, etc. Likewise there were delays or misses in a lot of the projected interactivity. I’m sure there was an awful lot of clever tech behind it all, but it wasn’t clever enough. Interactivity might just be an all or nothing thing – if something invites me to interact with it live, in a natural space, I will always be disappointed if it doesn’t react in a natural way to my gestures.

3) The best, most intuitive, pleasing and playful pieces were all intimately connected to the natural world; the projected leaves of the tree that fell, and that you could kick around the floor, the dandelion, the little prehistoric sea creatures that grew when you uncovered the a space from the sand, that multiplied, and evolved the longer they were exposed to the air. This goes forwards from the previous point – intuitive is important. We see ourselves, our worlds in art. Art is a way of reflecting on seeing and being, the enthusiasm for the combination of nature and tech, is encouraging for my continuing investigation of the collision of the bodied and the virtual space. It also hooked up with a sentence I read on the coach home:

“Judging by the importance of nature themes in digital installation art, many artists also seek compensation in computer simulations for the disappearance of natural environments. We hope to recapture through technology the pristine world that technological culture took away for us” – Narrative as Virtual Reality by Marie-Laure Ryan.

Continue reading Digital Design Sensations

I have been thinking a lot over the past few days about the new narrative strategies emerging in the digital age- moving on from why and what they are, and what has provoked them (pretty much everything that I put into my two speeches at Notts Trent and Leeds Met in January) and instead considering the implications for us as a society, in their being our main way of consuming stories.

Stories are a massive part of how we learn and grow as a species. They allow us to try out other eventualities, other roles, understand the feelings of others, and our own place in the world. Stories are intricately linked to play, and playing (whether actually, or theatrically) is a recognised learning technique for both adults and children. (See the massive success of TIE in schools, prisons, and deprived areas, as well as the ways that children learn about their world). Likewise play – the ability to try and test for no reason other than the fun of it – is vital to creative thinking, whether in business and tech (where it’s called ‘innovation’) or in the humanities and social sciences, play, and narrative, is at the very basis of our evolutionary and inventive potential.

There is largely considered to be a point when we ‘grow out of’ playing. It is in evidence, in teasing, between friends, but proper immersive narrative experiences are thenceforth ring-fenced. There are areas where they are ‘ok’, and they include theatrical spaces, board games, TV, music, video game, radio, film, books. The arts, in short.

The film/television experience is inarguably passive when compared with the play that we experience as children, and with the ‘old’ narrative strategies of books (and to a certain extent radio – though ‘old’ perhaps not) where we are placed, if not in the position of another, at least in a world-constituting position of one type or another. We build worlds of the books we read with our imaginations, likewise theatre is necessarily world-constituting, the tension of live-ness with narrative, reality with suspension of disbelief, is an inherently world-constituting process – and a collective one at that.

Film and television are passive forms of narrative consumption, they are involving, largely individual, and can pretend to be interactive (the arbitrary decision of whether someone stays or goes is not world constituting) and are no less a form for that, but in terms of play, in terms of one key aspect of play – there’s something missing. Empathy. The process of placing yourself at the centre of creating a narrative – constituting a world – seeing it through anthers’ eyes is largely missing (though of course there are exceptions to this). I’m not arguing that film and television is bad art, but I do believe that to subsist on a diet of only filmic narrative will provoke illness.
Continue reading Ourselves, in Other Contexts.