Digital Gateway 1999 - 2006
The National Museum of Photography Film and Television in Bradford, U.K. underwent a major multi-million pound re-development in 1998. As part of that re-development a brand new gallery was created called "Wired Worlds" and the museum commissioned a number of internationally recognised artists working within the field of 'digital installation' to develop existing or new proposals for this gallery.
Having been briefed about the philosophy and rationale of the new Gallery, the "Digital Gateway" was developed as a permanent and interactive computer artwork for the entrance of the "Wired Worlds" gallery.
Proposal - 'Digital Gateway'
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The concept of the " Digital Gateway " sets the context for the digital imaging gallery and the term 'Gateway' has associations of passage or transition from one state to another, from the physical world into the digital domain.
One of the main criteria for the work was to communicate and impart the premise that the exhibits in the gallery use a common language based on logic states i.e. on or off, represented in binary notation by one's and zero's and that all the visual representation of work in the gallery is founded on these basic but powerful principles.
General Description
Various possibilities were investigated regarding the best way of dealing with an installation where a number of criteria had to be considered :-
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the final output is interpreted utilising led technology
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there is some intelligent, "real-time" interactivity within the work
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visitor flow can vary from zero to highly active
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there is an immediacy of engagement and interpretation of the work
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to create a work of art that informs in a critical but accessible manner
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budgetary constraints
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After considering a number of options, the use of an easily identifiable image was considered the best way of communicating the notion that in the digital realm, visual information can be broken down into their basic components.
The 'Digital Gateway' therefore takes the human form as the vehicle for its central theme and imparts the idea that this representation can be broken down into the fundamental building blocks of one's and zero's, on or off, light and dark.
Installation Description
The "Gateway" has two opposing vertical walls of leds so that as the visitors enter the gallery and engages with the work, their shapes, form and movements are mimicked and re-interpreted as silhouettes of moving, 'pixelated' blocks and points of light. The coarseness of this pixelation becomes less as the visitors proceed through the work, eventually becoming small 0's and 1's, giving a sense of "digitisation".
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The installation has been designed so that this can be achieved in "real-time". If the gateway is busy then it is able to deal with multiple visitors without conflict and if the gateway is less busy then, depending on the programming there is the opportunity to "play" with the individual imagery.
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An unexpected benefit realised after the final installation was the richness, sense of depth and multi-layering of the work produced by the infinite reflections of the parallel glass walls.
Technical Description
The "Gateway" is approximately 3 meters x 2.5 meters x 3 meters and has two opposing vertical walls comprising 6,912 red light emitting diodes (led's) sandwiched between plate glass. As the work is interactive and there are large amounts of data to process, each wall houses 54 autonomous bu tnetworked display modules, each containing 128 led's, a Scorpion K4s microcomputer and infra-red sensors, arranged as a 6 column by 9 row matrix.
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Each module is controlled by a Scorpion SK4 embedded, multi-tasking control computer the size of a credit card and mounted on the back of the module together with other custom made interface and control hardware. Individual SK4s can act autonomously or communicate to the other rows and columns of modules by a simple signal network.