The latest exhibition to be unveiled at The Barbican traces the global evolution of digital technology since the early 1970s. All bases are covered with filmmakers, architects, musicians and game developers profiled – there’s work from VFX supervisor Paul Franklin and his team at Double Negative for Christopher Nolan’s 2010 flick Inception as well as Björk, Amon Tobin, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin. As assistant curator Sunny Cheung explains, more than an exhibition, Digital Revolution is an experiential reflection of the way our digitalised society rolls today.

Tempe Nakiska: How did the exhibition come about and why now?
Sunny Cheung: The exhibition has been in development for a couple of years and was developed as a touring exhibition. We are living in an exciting time when pretty much everyone now carries a smartphone around with them at all times, and cheap 3D printing and wearable computing are very much in the public eye right now. The Barbican has a history of digital focussed shows in the Curve gallery with shows from Cory ArcAngel, UVA and of course Random International’s Rain Room.

I guess one of the reasons for it’s relevance is encapsulated in the first section of the show called Digital Archaeology. Although the first web page came into existence within our life time, no copy of that original first page is archived anywhere. A great quote is “48 copies of the Gutenberg bible exist, yet not one copy of a website made just twenty odd years ago.” We are living in an age whereby the speed of technological progress means that historically significant items are becoming obsolete at rapid pace.

TN: There’s obviously a heavy musical influence here with the likes of Björk featured, right?
SC: My colleague on the show Dani Admiss I think selected a really inspiring and varied collection of music videos for this section. In our exhibition we feature Bjork’s Biophilia app as well as a sequence from Amon Tobin’s stunning live projection mapped show. We had originally hoped to stage a recreation of Amon Tobin’s live setup in the gallery but alas, we simply ran out room in the gallery. We have a collaborative piece in the show by will.i.am, Yuri Suzuki, Pasha Shapiro and Ernst Weber called Pyramidi which combines projection mapped synced visuals with de-constructed physical instruments. 

TN: How intrinsically are music and advances in digital technology linked?
SC: The link with music is strong in the show and we have an example of a Fairlight CMI which was the first digital synthesiser. Actually, ours was previously owned by Pink Floyd. Despite it having a low sampling memory it was state of the art and it’s limitation was used as a strength in songs such as Paul Hardcastle’s 19. The sound of drum machines such as the Linn drum machines also came to define the sound of the 80s in songs such as Don’t You Want Me and other synthpop songs as well as other rap. Today Digital Audio Workstations pretty much enable anyone with a laptop to create songs on the go with a full effects rack. The digital opens up many exciting avenues for new experimentation and ways to distort samples – although that by no means guarantees we will get exponentially more decent songs of course!

TN: Creative coding really is a culture unto itself. How is it explored here?
SC: Sure, creative coding has been around since pretty much a computer existed, it’s just that accessibility was more difficult before the advent of home computing unless you belonged to a university. When the home computing scene flourished in the 80s, creative coding manifested itself as part of the demoscene subculture and computer games – stars like Jeff Minter and Matthew Smith were literal bedroom coders! In the show, we also pay homage to physical computing culture in sections such as We Create where we look at everything from the Arduino and Raspberry PI, and also in DevArt which features a number of new commissions by some excellent creative coders including Zach Lieberman, Karsten Schmidt, Varvara Guljajeva and Mar Carnet.

TN: How are advances in digital technology assisting the new endeavours in creativity today?
SC: Aside from music we also see advances in aspects of real time manipulation of data. Zach Lieberman’s Play the World for example takes hundreds of live radio streams from around the world and then pitch maps them onto the keyboard to play in real time. It’s also done using open source technologies and I think that is something that is enabling many to dive into making their own creations. Many of the works are created with open source tools or hacked (cheap) commercial technologies such as the Kinect.

Digital Revolution runs until 14th September at The Barbican, Silk St, London EC2Y 8DS