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By Cliff Kuang | 12-07-2009 | 12:20 PM
This Tuesday, the sometimes stuffy Victoria & Albert Museum in London is vaulting into the digital age, with "Decode: Digital Design Sensations," an exhibition of cutting-edge digital art and design. The show was curated by OneDotZero, a production-house specializing in digital installations. Images can't do it justice, since almost all of the works are either video based or interactive. So, to give you a taste of the show, we've gathered pictures and videos for 12 of the pieces on display. Enjoy!
Here, a screen-cap of the exhibition's animated logo, by Karsten Schmidt.
By day, Aaron Koblin is a data-viz researcher at Google. But he first made his name with some stunning data-visualizations, including Flight Patterns, an animated piece generated from reams of FAA data. Video here.
Koblin also served as technical director for Radiohead's "House of Cards" video, which was created using 3-D laser scanners and modeling software.
rAndom International's "Study for Mirror." Each individual piece tracks you throughout the room--and the effect is uncanny.
Daan Roosegaarde's Flow 5.0, a wall of fans that activates
whenever you pass in front of it.
A video-still from Daniel Brown's On Growth and Form, a series of totally artificial "flowers" which sprout and grow, thanks to algorithms that mimic natural processes.
Daniel Rozin's stunning Weave Mirror. The piece consists of hundreds of bands colors with gradients. When someone passes before it, the gradients rotate, to create an image of the viewer. Watch here.
Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris can their seminal piece, We Feel Fine, "an almanac of human emotion." It's guts are a computer program that trawls hundreds of blogs, looking for the emotions that people are broadcasting. Harris and Kamvar then layered that data into five interactive charts. Some simply show the swarm of human sentiments; others show data, recording what sentiments are dominating; another shows the weather where the writer is located. The piece was recently cataloged in abook, but you can still see the interactive version here.
Bit.Code, a analog/digital display by Julius Popp, which was specially commissioned by the museum for this exhibition. Popp's perhaps best known for Bit.Fall, an installation which uses computer-controlled water-nozzles create words--in falling water. (You've got to watch the video to get it.)
Mehmet Akten Body Paint, a gestural interface for creating digital paintings.
Golan Levin's creepy Opto-Isolator, in which a blinking, mechanical eye follows your movement throughout a room.
Sennep and Yoke's Dandelion, which allows viewers to blow the leaves off of a virtual dandelion, using a hairdryer. Video here.
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