Digital Materials in Physical Spaces

Cutting Edge of the Contemporary: KNUST, Accra, and the Ghanaian Contemporary Art Movement

The aim of NetPark was to test the potential for artists, researchers and developers to create an extensible and mobile experience that connects to public spaces as a dynamic locative experience. Additionally, the project aimed to explore the educational potential of Netpark by creating educational works in collaboration with local school children. As a funded R&D project, NetPark was a collaboration between the arts organisation Metal, the mobile app development company Calvium, and researchers at the University of Brighton. This report presents the process and results of creating a free public digital arts park in Chalkwell Park, Southend-on-Sea, where Metal has its base. Five artists were commissioned to create digital artwork to be experienced by the general public in the park, supported by Metal and Calvium. Jamie Gledhill created the augmented reality project ‘Talking Trees’ utilising the Junaio browser; Rosie Poebright created ‘ Run to Flight’ a locative audio app using GPS; Joel Cahen created ‘ The Oneironaut’ where users experience a narrated dream and contention of reality; Mark Grist and DJ Mixy (Michael Riccardi) created ‘ The Spoken Word Tours’ - a series of performance and musical works based on observations of park users, also including work with school children as performance poetry. Finally, Metal commissioned music duo Matmos to create a new sound work app, where the artists sampled sounds from the park and made new musical works. In addition to the commissioned artists, five local primary schools took part in a series of eight-week long workshops to create locative story apps for younger visitors to the park, in collaboration with professional authors and illustrators. The researchers at the University of Brighton’s School of Arts, Design and Media collected and analysed research material, including interviews and observations, that provided insights into stakeholder issues related to the project delivery, the perspective of makers on creating locative media art, the user experience of artworks in the form of locative media apps, and the educational aspect of creating works with schools. The key insights are: * NetPark is a creative response to the challenges local authorities face around public spaces and parks, drawing on opportunities of the digital and creative economy, to establish a process for artistic and educational creation as well as stakeholder engagement. * NetPark shows how the combination of the park setting park with digital, mobile and locative technologies facilitates new user experiences and engages new audiences. * Engaging local school children in locative media creation for NetPark has a range of educational opportunities and benefits. * Understanding the user experience and the educational opportunities of NetPark can inform further engagement with diverse communities. * Curating and maintaining NetPark is an important part of its strategy and follows the setting-up process. * The NetPark Toolkit contains guidance and resources on the process of commissioning, producing and maintaining both locative digital art works and locative educational digital works in public outdoor spaces. * The NetPark projects makes a contribution to the long-term development of public space in a digital age.

Digital art is increasingly becoming engaged with contemporary art. Artists began using programming and technology to create art in the 1950s and 1960s and the revolutionary advances in digital technology have spawned new approaches to making art. Originally viewed as outsider art, digital art gained international recognition in the late 1960s and again at the turn of the century. Traditional art institutions were not as quick to embrace this creative use of technology as artists did. In the 1970s, several international organizations were created to support this art form and remain active today. Exhibitions during this period were both juried and curated. During the 1970s and 1980s, there were very few digital art curators. The change occurred during the late 1990s when museums began to take notice of and exhibit digital art. The Internet has enabled artist, scholar and art institutional websites and the establishment of extensive archives of this art form. This online presence is contributing to the integration of digital art with contemporary art. Publishers have also followed suit and there is now a good selection of books on the theory, history and practice of digital art, led by the MIT Press, Thames & Hudson, and others. As digital art continues to merge with contemporary art, the division between the two will continue to lessen. However, what is important is to rectify the art historical record to give digital art the rightful place it has earned in the contemporary art landscape.

Now filling the cavernous space of a renovated, turn-of-the-century munitions factory, the ZKM (Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany, www.zkm.de), has quickly established itself as Europe’s premier digital design and exhibition space. Launched in 1989 as the European center of new media research and production, the ZKM moved into its permanent home, in October, 1997, as a nationally sanctioned site for the production and exhibition of digital and electronic arts. The ZKM houses an extensive media library, a media theatre, the Institute for Visual Media, the Institute for Music and Acoustics, as well as two expansive exhibition spaces, the Media Museum and the Museum for Contemporary Art. These various institutes and spaces collaborate to bring together artists, performers, designers, programmers, scientists, and media specialists for the development of new interactive art projects. The ZKM has produced a wide array of complex, interactive installations by international artists-in-residence, an exciting series of artistic CD-Roms and critical commentaries, an innovative series of intermedia acoustic performances, and cutting-edge exhibitions that combine the most recent developments in digital art with historical corollaries from the collection of the Museum for Contemporary Art.

This chapter is part of personal artistic research through which I analyse how Artificial Intelligence can create a connection between physical and virtual space in different artistic practices and how it can generate new perspectives in the process of educating the next generations. Artists have always been interested in problematising the concept of space and contemporary art involves various approaches that question how we relate to physical and virtual space. Virtual space can function as an extension of physical space. In their practices, artists create different virtual spaces that compose or recompose physical spaces in order to explore topics related to cognitive science, ethics, pop culture, or themes related to the memory of a space. This chapter proposes an analysis of how children might develop critical thinking through interaction with this type of artistic practice. The participatory nature of contemporary art can serve as a platform for informal learning through which the educational process could take place via observation, debate, and creative workshops based on the artworks displayed in the exhibition space. The use of AI is more and more common nowadays, with artists staging various dialogues between virtual and physical space through the use of AI as a connecting node. This artistic research, resulting in art objects, can shape platforms of debate in children's education by enhancing critical thinking. The technological advancement we are witnessing has the potential to enhance different analytical capacities in children’s education through exposure and interaction with AI-augmented artwork in physical and virtual space, or even at the intersection of these two.

With the rapid development of the 21st-century technological revolution, digital interactive art has gradually manifested its cultural value and aesthetic significance globally. It specifically focuses on the research status and challenges faced by the Chinese academic community regarding the emotionalization of digital public art interaction experiences. Departing from both theoretical and practical dimensions, it elucidates the concept, foundational theories, and relevant research status of emotionalized interactive experiences. As the core of digital public art, emotionalized interaction aims to forge a closer emotional connection between artworks and audiences through digital media and technology, thereby enhancing the expressive power of artworks and the experiential satisfaction of audiences. The paper further identifies the challenges confronting current practices in the creation of digital art and proposes strategies and directions for enhancing emotionalized interactive experiences. Its objective is to promote the emotionalization level of Chinese digital public art, providing a foundation and direction for future development. Ultimately, it seeks to better cater to the aesthetic needs of audiences, foster the dissemination and development of digital art, and offer crucial theoretical support for the integration of Chinese digital art into the international arena.

The objectives of the research are: (1) to study the images, events of fairy tales and legends, (2) to study creative design of artworks from fairy tales, (3) to present paintings for digital distribution and literacy. This study is a qualitative research. A qualitative study is conducted using multiple regions of Chinese fairy tales and legends as the research object. The research data are collected through relevant literature, related books and research papers. The research tools include survey method, observation method, interview method and focus group discussion to collect data and information. The population and sample of the study consisted of 40 people, and the data are analyzed using concepts and theories. The results of the research are presented through descriptive analysis. The results of the research are as follows: Firstly, to study the origin, background and development of Chinese fairy tales and legends; images and events. Secondly, to analyze the characteristics, styles, and techniques of expression of Medieval painting art; artists and works of Medieval painting art, applying them to the creative design of artworks. As well as analyzing and applying the concepts of Digital media art and Digital illustration design. Finally, combining the integration of Digital media technology and art, presenting fairy tales and legends through Digital art, and dissemination of innovative paintings on electronic media and literacy. In conclusion, the combination of Chinese fairy tales and legends and Medieval painting art can produce a unique visual language and visual effect in Digital art. This application makes Chinese fairy tales and legends easier to understand and appreciate, and expands the inheritance and dissemination of Chinese fairy tales and legends.

Since the 1970s, the emergence of digital works of art has broken the medium restrictions of traditional works of art, and has also subverted the creation methods of traditional works of art. In the context of contemporary art, the unique media and technologies possessed by digital artworks not only enrich the forms of artistic expression, but also have multiple creative methods, multi-media and multi-field performance capabilities, and help creators to become more diversified and convey humanistic creative ideas. Such works can not only trigger the audience’s aesthetic experience, but also stimulate the audience’s thinking on issues such as self-identity, self-worth and social identity. The psychological healing function of digital art works created with digital media art provides new possibilities for experiences that traditional art works cannot bring. Today, with the rapid development of science and technology, digital media art is also becoming more and more mature, but due to technical and cultural constraints, digital art works have not fully exerted their psychological healing functions. With the resolution of technical and cultural issues, digital media art will have more room for development in psychological healing.

This article analyses the exhibition The People’s Choice (Arroz con Mango) , which was curated by the artistic collective Group Material and on view in New York City in 1981. The project is of peculiar relevance with regard to questions of transcultural knowledge production, because the artists asked the predominantly Spanish-speaking residents of the neighborhood where the exhibition space was located to participate by selecting their own personal objects or artworks for the show. However, this inclusion of personal objects created tension as well, mainly because the artistic collective defined the concept of the exhibition in advance by suggesting a specific choice of objects, and also because the idea of a democratic empowerment of the public ultimately remains problematic. This further raises the question of how the shift from personal object to something viewed in an exhibition also leads to a transformation of the agency of the displayed objects as well. The article contextualizes the exhibition The People’s Choice (Arroz con Mango) , exploring notions of collectivity and participatory art in an alternative space that seems to creatively oppose the mainstream of larger established institutional spaces in New York. Finally, it shows how the circulation and transformation of the exhibited objects bear the intrinsic possibility to shape forms of transcultural collectivity when they act as mediators in processes of transcultural knowledge production.

The advent of the digital revolution and the ubiquitous integration of digital technology in art curation, have led to unprecedented transformations in reshaping the accessibility and engagement of art and heritage. This study delves into the intersection of digital technology and art curation, and attempts to explore the multifaceted and transformative influences of digital technology in curatorial practices in the contemporary art world. The research used a case study approach and investigated Google Arts & Culture and the Rijksmuseum’s Rijksstudio as prominent examples of large-scale digitalisation and digital art curation. The study aims to establish a nuanced and comprehensive understanding of art digitalisation, and how digital practices are redefining curatorial methods in the art world. Drawing from the critical perspectives concerning digitalisation, the study deliberates on the shifting paradigms of authenticity, the digital divide and the diminishing materiality of artworks in virtual environments. The findings from the study suggest that digital transformations in curatorial practices have ushered in an era of increased accessibility, and immersive user interactions with art and heritage. However, the digital curation of art manifests the emergence of a post-custodial paradigm, which is characterised by commodification of art, and decontextualisation of art and heritage.

Between Motion and Rest: Encountering Bodies in/on Display

This paper examines the dynamic convergence of technology and artistic expression, highlighting how new digital tools and platforms have reshaped creativity, communication, and cultural production. By tracing historical shifts from traditional to media-based and digital art forms, it examines how emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality, and interactive media are influencing contemporary artistic practices. Artists and technologists are collaborating to blur the boundaries between creator and audience, digital and physical, real and virtual. Topics covered include digital and web-based art, the role of artificial intelligence in creation, social media’s impact on art distribution, the emergence of NFTs, and interactive installations that engage audiences in novel ways. Through these lenses, the study discusses the philosophical, technical, and social implications of a technologically mediated artistic future. The paper concludes by emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue in shaping a more inclusive and innovative arts ecosystem. Keywords: Digital Art, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Interactive Installations, New Media, Social Media.

Currently, the rapid emergence of the digital economy has spawned the arrival of the era of big data.With the rapid development of science and technology, Chinese has also entered the era of big data for contemporary art.The engagement of big data in every aspect of our life has begun to influence the development process of Chinese contemporary art, which has also begun to shape a new form of Chinese contemporary art, with many creation modes emerging at home and abroad. The influence of the era of big data is first reflected in many aspects, such as digital art media, art collection and trading market, art management education, etc. In some colleges and universities, design disciplines, such as art and technology, digital media art and interactive design, have emerged to meet the needs of the development of contemporary science and technology and art. They are new forms of art expression at the historic moment with great development prospects and possibilities. This paper mainly studies the influence and change of the development of big data on the contemporary art world, how they change, integrate and develop, and evaluates the value of statistical thinking under the background of big data and the new form of contemporary art.

Digital technology's advancement has increased the visibility of digital art and traditional art heritage in the art world. It consists of a variety of artistic pursuits that leverage digital art tools and platforms, creating new avenues for artistic expression. The goal of the study is to comprehend how these digital art and traditional art heritage forms affect students' aesthetic enjoyment and to look at perceived advantages and disadvantages from both the viewpoints of college students and history teachers. The study also examines variances across various academic fields and artistic mediums as well as the long-term impacts on students' artistic growth and originality. To acquire comprehensive and in-depth insights, a qualitative research strategy was used. Fifteen college students from college were chosen through deliberate sampling for in-depth interviews. Interviews were used to gather the material, which was then thematically examined. To guarantee the reliability and validity of the results, the findings were triangulated and independently checked. The study found that second-degree creativity and short video culture have been heavily included into university courses on digital aesthetics. Different effects of short video culture were seen in different academic fields and artistic mediums.

This paper attempts to describe the signifier choice of student artists in thematic representations of digital visual arts and determine its implications for digital pedagogy. Utilising a qualitative approach to research and covering a corpus of six digital artworks of student artists, the semiotic analysis utilising Peirce’s (1991) sign modes showed the student artists’ preference for mostly indexical and symbolic signifiers in thematic representations of Filipinos’ resiliency to the pandemic. This signifier choice of student artists was influenced by their experience, family, self, other artists, and their initiatives for finding information and drawing inspiration from online sources, as revealed in the conducted Focus Group Discussion (FGD) with the participants. Moreover, the individual interviews with the participants demonstrated that the student artists’ choice of signifiers served as a vehicle for expression, representation, and impression of ideas, themes, and abstractions dominating their artworks. This study calls for the integration of digital artmaking tools into pedagogy to provide opportunities for artistic expression and support diverse representation. Teachers can introduce various digital tools and platforms, create assignments that encourage creative experimentation, and foster a safe and inclusive classroom environment. Future research could explore the practical applications of digital pedagogy in visual arts education.