Bill Thompson likes the ways technology and art intersect.
At a new discussion on the future of the humanities in a digital world the gap night row was asked to name a digital art work that had tender them.
All stumbled, maybe undecided of who was carrying out 'interesting' work in this hurriedly varying field, leaving the representatives at the Media Festival/Arts with the clarity that digital might not unequivocally tally as far as they were concerned.
My initial considered was that the many engaging square of digital art I'd come upon in the final year was unquestionably the new manuscript from The Editors.
In This Light and on This Evening is a superb work, and all about it detached from the quivering of Tom Smith's outspoken chords and the strings of Chris Urbanowicz's guitar is the product of digital technologies, initial in the college of music and as then it is distributed and played.
It certainly has the correct to be called a digital art work, even if it is then embedded in a blurb model that is struggling to adjust to the realities of the network economy.
One musician whose work is unquestionably - and infrequently defiantly - digital is cellist Peter Gregson.
On Monday dusk we sat preoccupied as he achieved in King's Place London in a show that amalgamated his own compositions with functions from Steve Reich and Max Richter, accompanied on shade by technology supposing by Microsoft Research and others.
We enjoyed a World Wide Telescope fly-over of Iceland, the time-lapse photographs from a SenseCam worn-out by his collaborator, Microsoft's Tim Regan, as he delivered element to the venue and a few of the incredible maps Eric Fischer creates by plotting the place information from Flickr photographs of leading cities, along with a few incredible information visualisations.
I admire Peter's work, but can't elude the realization that we had been online for scarcely 5 years before he was born.
He has grown up in to a world infused with the prospective of digital technologies, and it is evidently clear in his incredibly assured and convincing performances in that he alternates between two cellos, a Colin Irving acoustic cello aware from any fibre quartet, and a law 5 fibre Erik Jensen electric cello, a unusual fundamental savage that plugs right away in to his digital toolbox to supply a remade sound that he harnesses in to music.
Later in the week we outlayed a captivating hour in the firm of Matthew Applegate, improved well known as Pixelh8, as he explored the area of fragment tunes - music done from aged computers - in a speak at Kettle's Yard art studio in Cambridge, segment of their commemoration of the work of John Cage.
Hybrid world
Matthew described his experience using the aged computers at the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park, and the happiness of component electronic music to the stroke supposing by hand-cranking an aged automatic calculator.
Both Peter Gregson and Matthew Applegate work in ways that simply do not recognize the border between digital and analogue, and they confute any affirm that we now live in a 'digital' world.
Matthew's use of a soldering iron, and Peter's technical skill with his instrument, sojourn profoundly located in the earthy world, even if they soak up digital technologies in to their imaginative processes.
What they show is that we now live in a hybrid world.
I faced up to this hybrid world myself not long ago when we well-known my fiftieth birthday and had to confirm what music to play.
In the aged days we'd have had a smoke-stack of 45rpm singles and invited people to select what to fool around next, but my aged singles are in a cupboard, inexperienced for years.
I toyed with the idea of creation a playlist or two, but that would have meant formulation in allege and moreover insincere that we could expect the way the tinge of the party would change over time.
Shiny fondle
This is wily - I'm always ready to segue in to The Clash's initial album, but manhood has taught me that others can feel differently.
So we motionless to follow the modern conform in supervision and lapse manage to the people, lenient the party-goers to find their own solutions to the complaint of what to attend and dance to.
I plugged the loudest speakers we could find in to my desktop P.C. and proposed iTunes, and used the Remote app on my iPad to select the songs.
Over the dusk the iPad was transfered around and any person who longed for to could select what we listened to.
Apart from a few rsther than awful transitions when people proposed their strain personification as well early it worked unequivocally well, and any person who wasn't certain what to put on next could simply use the 'Genius' symbol to select identical songs to the one now playing.
Using the iPad as manage desk pad was fascinating, as a touchscreen device offers a far more discerning and beguiling way of engaging with what is on special discount than any remote manage ever could, with dozens of minuscule buttons and unknown icons.
Remote on the iPad is precisely the same as using iTunes on the desktop, and even even though it's a feeble written square of program it did the job in few instances well.
Of march my imaginative use of digital technology usually entangled joining the pieces together and receiving the danger that my costly glossy fondle would finish up damaged or waterlogged in prosecco, whilst Peter Gregson and Matthew Applegate are both exploring the inventive and performative prospective that the new collection offer.
But we similar to to regard that we are all relocating in the same direction, and that we'll shortly attain the theatre where it creates as small clarity to speak about 'digital art' as it does about 'new media'.
Bill Thompson is an eccentric publisher and periodic sportscaster on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet. He is now using the BBC on its repository project.
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