5 Ways To Experience Digital Art in Urban Spaces
By Marie Chatel
You might not have realized yet, but digital art already takes over our public spaces, and its presence is about to rise exponentially. Here’s a highlight of 5 ways you can encounter digital art in your day-to-day life, and the history behind this emerging urban visual culture.
Walls and facades are incredibly efficient canvases for artists to interact with the public. The use of buildings as surfaces of display — that is associating architecture with 2D graphics — dates back from the roaring twenties, which saw in both Europe and the United States the rise of mass-consumerism, along with the appearance of department stores, fashionable window displays, outdoor lights, and the development of the billboard industry. With electronics, technologies of screen display have evolved, but the prime functionality never fainted. Conspicuously this form of presentation is now used not only for commercial purposes but also for artistic and cultural endeavors.
Digital artists augment buildings’ facades with either projection or through the interface of screens, may it be a movie or a photograph, a moving or a still image, a computer-generated creation or a recording. Here, we’ll differentiate them into two forms of displays, the ones visually interpreting data and the ones interacting with passers-by.
Screens displaying data
Any image translates a piece of information, and while it can act as its own signifiers (e.g., Faiyaz Jafri, Supersad(e) (2018), Nicolas Sassoon, Wallpapers (2015), Coastal City (2016)), it can also translate a numerical or textual content, something we call data visualization. Information can be processed in real-time as is the case with Andrea Polli’s Particle Falls (2008–2018), an installation showing the quality of the air with streams of blue pixels when it is pure and red spots when it is saturated with PM2.5 particles.
However, in the context of digital technologies, artworks can also involve substantial processing content of information, as algorithms and software programming allow artists to set criteria of their own. A good example is Refik Anadol’s latest intervention on the facades of the Walt Disney Concert Hall (Dreams, 2018). The artist used computer intelligence to process up to 100 years of the venue’s picture archive, which he then projects (in real-time or as a preset) onto the building’s facades in the form of colorful patterns and motifs.
Interactive Screens
Although these installations also involve a fair deal of data, what’s conspicuous is their connection to the public. Here the human/machine interface is not controlled by the artist but by spectators. Interestingly these installations can react to various forms of stimuli such as visual, audio, or touch-based information. For instance, in 1997 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer used wireless sensors to track the audience’s movement, triggering different image sequences for his Displaced Emperors (Relational Architecture #2). In Daniel Iregui’s Control No Control (2012–2018) graphic lines converge where visitors touch the screen, and in the Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat’s Saving Face (2012–2017), a camera, small screen, and facial recognition allows the projection of individuals’ faces, with traits merging as the image overlay with the portraits of previous visitors.
Another compelling project is Open Urban Television. Developed in 2015 by the collective JARD, the installation connects in real-time with CCTV’s across Madrid’s public spaces and puts images in an open circuit. People can activate the city’s wall screens and share instantaneous information with their fellow citizens, like the recording of protests or any other urban life momentum.
Another way to experience digital art is in the form of three-dimensional objects. The interest for 3D signifiers in urban spaces started in 1972 when architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown famously analyzed the Las Vegas strip. The duo differentiated what they called a “decorated shed,” that is a building with visual information on its front or a nearby billboard, and a “duck” or “building as sign,” whose architectural qualities embed the information it means to symbolize. Critically, this theory valued volumes and objects for their visibility in an urban space saturated with planar visuals that were only understandable as signs size up. In digital art, software-designed sculptures and pavilions are apparent candidates, but objects can involve other forms of physicality or virtuality — the common denominator being that they indicate some spatiality.
Sculptures
For now, this segment relies on traditional construction technique except artist use 3D software-computing to design the artworks and structures. However, this could evolve significantly soon as methods of 3D-printing grow to produce larger components, making the digital trait ever more visible. Numerous well-known artists such as Anish Kapoor (Cloud Gate, 2006), Jaume Plensa (Wonderland, 2012), and Jeff Koons (Seated Ballerina, 2017) use this type of conception. Artists like Ken Kelleher also reimagine the digital sculpture with the use of computers to render what place sculpture could occupy in urban spaces. Conspicuously, these lay bare of the physical constraints to focus on how digital creations can activate public space.
Light Installation
Although spaces are often thought of as physical, material structures, notions of an enclosure, perspective, and a view can be inferred through lights. This approach to urban areas changes quickly due to LED technology and might result in the creation of dazzling virtual spaces. Daan Roosegarde plays a critical role in developing this scene, notably with his dream landscape Waterlicht (2016–2018) that combines LEDs, software, lenses, and humidity to create a northern-lights-like architecture.
Augmented Realities
This immersive technology is very efficient in allowing visitors to interact with public space. The spatial intervention in only virtual and activated with QR codes using screen displays as an interface. John Craig Freeman who plays a tremendous role in AR’s artistic scene is also the one who works with public spaces the most. His work includes Metro-NeXt (2014), a virtual subway entrance taking straight to Zürich, and Border Memorial: Frontera de Los Muertos (2012) allowing visitors to visualize the locations of remains from migrant workers who died at the US/Mexico border. This stream of digital art is now primarily dedicated to smaller enclosed spaced but could also differ our relationship to urban space in the years to come, so watch out for this!
