Digital Art's Realm_Kinetica Art Fair

Saturday the 28th of February, the London digital art scene gave us a clear sign: the digital are scene in London is vibrant and living, artists are applying new technologies to create new aesthetics and new languages and this is absolutely amazing!
The Kinetica museum is doing a brilliant job in promoting digital and new media arts and the Kinetica art fair is the proof of this commitment.

On Saturday MutechLab went to "watch" the Kinetica art fair and it was as cool as I expected.
The fair/exibition was hosted by the University of Westminster, as I recently discovered, Kinetica is a "moving museum", that since occupying a large commercial space in Spitalfields Market between 2006 and 2007, now operates as a touring programme of exhibitions, events and workshops. I found this extremely coherent with what Kinetica stands for: "the research, display and promotion of digital arts (kinetic, technological and electronic artwork)."

How do you sell digital arts? this was one of the topic of the panel "New Realms in Art: Collecting and Exhibiting New Media Art' , that saw Mike Stubbs from FACT, Diane Harris (Director of the Kinetica Museum) and Emma Quinn, raising the question and pinpointing how digital art is deeply connected with the technologies it is created with and with the place and environment where it is displayed.
So What is the answer to this question?  For its multimedia and technological nature, digital arts need a new way to be displayed, beyond the classical "museum" space, and it also have to be valued (let's say sold) and promoted differently. Kinetica Art Fair shows that digital art is about experience, senses and research, it is different from sculpture, lighting, photography and painting even though deeply interconnected with them.
Can "experience"be the new currency to value digital art?

The space that hosted the fair, is called P3 and it's a bunker, an old factory part of the University of Westminster, the bunker is bright and big, the artworks were displayed divided by artists and placed almost randomly, apparently without an explicit path to follow.

The artworks displayed were varied and all inspiring for their aesthetics, for the technology behind them or simply because they told me a story about the human being or the society we live in.

There were a number of robotic installations, I personally don't like robots but the movement and the shape simulated by the Giles Walker's robots was incredibly fascinating and somehow real!

Stunning 3d cube mapping from Wrap3 that simulated the illusion of seeing a dancer trapped in a cube

Less original but nice and colorful the light based artworks

A special element of this fair was the performances program that saw the most original and cutting edge digital arts performers presenting interesting stuff.
The international collective body>data>space presented "DARE WE DO IT REAL-TIME?"
The performance is a live dance,interacting with light and visual projection via sensors and a mobile phone.The dance was deep and passionate, trying to represents blurring identities between cyborgs, androids humanoids and at some point cliched futuristic imagery.
The most original engaging and thought-provoking performance of the day was definitely the "Souldance" from artist and performer Anak.
Defined as "An attempt to explore the possibility of touching the other self",  Souldance is a captivating shadow dance created with a mirror and a light, and accompanied by a live electric guitar. Simple and stunning!

Kinetika Art Fair was an inspiring event that will stimulate further research and studies about the evolution of digital arts and technologies and the creation of new "spaces" that "feed and generates" conversations about digital arts while displaying it.  

pz

More: www.kinetica-museum.org