Placed within Tent Lon­don (a design show part of the Lon­don Design Fest­ival), Tent Digital is an inter­na­tional show­case of the best digit­ally enabled design. FIT vis­ited the event at the Old Tru­man Brew­ery, Brick Lane on the sunny Sat­urday 26th Septem­ber 2009.

As we entered the digital exhib­i­tion we found ourselves in near abso­lute dark­ness, sur­roun­ded by flash­ing lights and fluor­es­cent beams. This came as a sur­prise because the rest of Tent Lon­don had been bright and cheerful.

Nick: The first piece we examined was “Go Scan Your­self” by Wag­gott Tripp & Gra­ham. This install­a­tion involved a wall moun­ted scan­ner and a selec­tion of old tele­vi­sion sets. I took a time to scan my face and become part of the exhib­i­tion.

Kana: I believe this install­a­tion was about intro­du­cing the audi­ence to Tent Digital, play­ing on the human desire to use every­day objects in altern­at­ive ways. It’s com­mon for people to have a desire to scan their body parts with a pho­to­copy machine, simply because it’s pro­hib­ited.  This was a fun intro­duc­tion to the event.

Nick: The next install­a­tion of interest to me was “Tokyo Won­der” by WOW, ori­gin­ally com­mis­sioned for the Milan Salone in 2008. The imagery in this piece was sub­lime and cre­ated tricks using simple visual ele­ments. We see a train in the dis­tance as it gets closer our per­cep­tion changes as we real­ise the wid­ows of the car­riages are vend­ing machines lined up side by side. Then we see a haze of multi-colour particles as they drift down to form a tech­nicolor city scape. There was a lot of visual beauty in this short fea­ture, don’t you think?

Kana: Per­son­ally for me it was sen­ti­mental, as I’m from Japan. The com­bin­a­tion of move­ment and col­our really cap­tured the essence of Tokyo. The piece had an exquis­ite beauty and the move­ment made it very enga­ging and mes­mer­ising. I found it quite humor­ous that the drum machine install­a­tion next to Tokyo Won­der was mak­ing such a lot of noise, it iron­ic­ally cre­ated an ines­cap­able Tokyo like atmo­sphere.
Nick: The next exhibit we saw was an inter­est­ing one, in fact it made me moment­ar­ily con­fused. Troy Abbott’s digital bird cage fea­tures a pre-recorded bird (Actual Video Birds) silently perched within a small LCD like monitor.

Kana: I liked the fact that it had a kind of a pat­ron­ising atti­tude towards human beings. We become engaged by the bird stand­ing proudly, dir­ectly look­ing at us from within the cage … it leaves no space for us to treat it as a digital cre­ation. I liked the choice of animal, birds are almost arrogant-like and dis­play great con­fid­ence. How­ever, as more Tamagoc­chi like vir­tual pets appear, it’s sad to think that people are so eas­ily enter­tained by visual stim­u­lus. I feel wor­ried about those who are only attrac­ted to the cute­ness of pets and don’t want the respons­ib­il­ity of real­ity, leav­ing the neg­at­ive aspects behind.

Nick: This essence of los­ing real­ity was again cap­tured in the next piece by MSA visu­als. A star like digital por­trait morphed as par­ti­cipants stood before the cam­era and screen. This install­a­tion writ­ten in C++, Open­Frame­works and OpenCV ana­lysed a video feed via an infra-red cam­era in real time, cre­at­ing 1080p HD out­put using OpenGL.  This exhibit was a great show­case for open source soft­ware, which is a key ele­ment of digital inter­act­ive work. You can down­load the developed tech­no­logy on the memo.tv web­site.

Kana: What did you think of over­all Tent Digital?

Nick: I think Tent Digital was a great way for product design­ers to become more aware of the digital. Digital and product design can some­times feel sep­ar­ated, so for a digital event like this held within Tent Lon­don was an excel­lent oppor­tun­ity for each party to gain inspir­a­tion from each other. I can see future Tent exhib­i­tions fea­tur­ing a great deal of digit­ally adap­ted product design.

Kana: I really enjoyed this event, but was by a little saddened by the lack of aware­ness for sus­tain­ab­il­ity. We are in an age of cre­at­ing the unne­ces­sary as neces­sary. How­ever say­ing this I’m excited for the future of the design industry to provide sus­tain­able and mean­ing­ful designs.