Decode: Digital Design Sensations at the V&A

Despite this being the decade we’re all meant to go digital, exhibitions that really engage with the subject still seem few and far between. With this in mind, Decode: Digital Design – the V&A’s latest show in collaboration with digital veterans onedotzero – couldn’t be better timed.

Entering the transformed Porter Gallery, you pass through a swathe of grass-like LED stalks that flicker on and off in response to your movement, to find yourself in a corridor lined with monitors. Across their screens flash rotating and repeating patterns, generated by creatively written computer code. Each work is labelled with a combination of three categories that distinguish digital approaches to design: Code, Network and Interactivity.

The challenge with this exhibition is that many of the screen-based works could easily be displayed on a home computer. While innovative, some of the code-based work appears to be little more than a clever screensaver. Other works like We Feel Fine – Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris’s visualisation of live status updates from around the world – are freely accessible online. By putting these displays in a gallery environment though, Decode gives us the space to explore, compare and contemplate them.

Moving further in, the work evolves into larger installations that rely on communications technology and interactivity. The work that really stands out is that is that which demands to be displayed in a gallery or live context. Simon Heijens’ Tree and Lightweed animations, which respond to wind monitored by a sensor outside the gallery, are a real highlight. As is Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Make Out, with its hundreds of videos of kissing couples sourced from Youtube rippling across the wall.

My favourite of these was Ross Phillips’ Videogrid, made of panels containing a repeating second of video recorded by groups of visitors on the other side of the screen. Together they make a quirky, transient display that leaves you feeling like you’ve shared something with those around you.

As a whole, whether you're marveling at a computer simulation of flight paths or throwing virtual paint over screens with your arms, Decode leaves you feeling like a big kid in the Science Museum’s Launchpad. For the £5 entrance fee that’s well worthwhile. There are also further works situated around the rest of the museum and, for digital enthusiasts, there’s a concurrent exhibition of early computer art, Digital Pioneers, in Rooms 90 and 88a.

Decode: Digital Design is at the V&A until 11th April 2010.

Reviewed for Spoonfed.