The Expansion of Digital Art Spaces
Words by Sophie Norton
The recent name-change of Facebook and its other platforms to Meta, as part of a larger shared Metaverse vision occurred last Autumn, on 28th October 2021. The name change sparked some questions surrounding the increasing role of digital spaces in real life, and what this means for the arts and creativity in particular. In the words of Pew Research Center, the term Metaverse is used to describe ‘the realm of computer-generated, networked extended reality’. This can be anything from social media platforms to digital art exhibitions, to immersive online games. The lure of the Metaverse is largely its accessibility; why have an in-person event when you can overcome the exclusivity and host an online one?
Crowds Visiting The Mona Lisa, The Louvre
The benefits of digital spaces can be observed in regard to the exhibition and sale of artworks. Online catalogues give the viewer the capacity to explore the exhibition in their own time, and in the comfort of their own home. The time ordinarily eaten up by transport and queues is saved, and the problem of peering past crowds of bobbing heads and floating phones as people pause to take pictures of the artworks, is solved. This need for remote access became a global problem caused by the 2020 lockdown, which saw many institutions create navigable online tours of their collections and spaces, many of which became available through Google Arts & Culture. Public interest in virtual art boomed like never before, aided somewhat by the growth of the NFT market in the same years, again forcing digital exhibition platforms to take an increasingly relevant stage. Visual culture wasn’t the only sector that was forced to adapt itself to survive, as the cancellation of all concerts and touring events saw musicians left struggling to release and promote their songs.
Virtual tour of exhibition at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo
One of the ways we’ve witnessed the music industry adapt to these obstacles is through the production of animated music videos that take place in digital spheres. The benefits to creating engaging visual content this way is that costs and labour time is reduced, and hence a ‘greener’ solution to musical accompaniment is created. My most prominent example is The 1975’s 2020 album Notes on a Conditional Form (NOACF), in which the band’s inner activists shone through, as they collaborated with well-known Youth Climate Activist Greta Thunberg on the featuring track. The band had been making public their efforts to reduce carbon emissions at their gigs, suggesting a show powered on vegetable oil, and official merch stands that consisted of screen-printing their logo onto existing clothing.
Still of the interactive waiting room from 'Mindshower Digital Detox'
This album takes up notably more of a digital space than their previous ones, as the band and Creative Director Ben Ditto commissioned 14 artists to respond to different tracks from the 22-song album, in any way that they liked. The result? Fourteen music videos ranging in style from 3D animation to AI responses, that all expand on each song’s themes. The band wanted to embrace the “benefits and potential” of the technological future, and use digital artworks to explore and share these possibilities. The resulting 14 videos formed an online exhibition that can be found in a YouTube playlist on the band’s YouTube profile, with their descriptions acting as artwork captions. This digital exhibition was launched alongside an interactive website for the ‘Mindshower Digital Detox’ retreat advertised in Jon Emmony’s video for The Birthday Party, which features a computerised frontman Matty Healy handing in his phone and exchanging his clothing for a white uniform, before navigating a fantasy land of mushrooms and memes. The website itself is an archive of the creation of NOACF, and visitors can access interviews and photos of the band and the album’s creation process by clicking on various items of digital furniture in the digital lobby.
Still of a room inside Fluorescent Smogg's 'Dream Machine'
This interactive digital space reminds me of Fluorescent Smogg’s Dream Machine, an online collaborative art show by a group of artists including Sickboy, Good Guy Boris, and the colourful Nano4814. Visitors can access art situated in a digital landscape of changing debris and different zones, where they can observe the works, access their description, and actually buy them if they fancy it. In a similar way as The 1975, Fluorescent Smogg’s intention is to use their digital gallery to provide a “virtual Utopia, brought from Dystopia”, with the hope of instilling a sense of optimism for the real-life future.
Still of Glass Animals' interactive website
The interactive website contains nuggets of information and hidden references to the artists themselves in the same way as The 1975’s Mindshower, which bears similarity to Glass Animals’ website, which is based on the pastel ‘vaporwave-esque’ visuals of a 2010 computer. The contemporary indie rock band is represented pretty well by the sub-genre visuals and sounds of electronic music and art, and their site also allows visitors to access music clips, fan art, and sneak peaks of future projects. Glass Animals’ latest album Dreamland was also released in 2020, and as a consequence their music video for Space Ghost Coast to Coast was produced remotely, featuring multiple digital versions of frontman and producer Dave Bayley simultaneously dancing in a digitised rendition of the park opposite his real-life London flat. Declan Mckenna is another contemporary British singer who joins in with stylistically similar digital music videos, also produced and released in the 2020 lockdown. His visual accompaniment to Daniel, You're Still a Child, and the lyric videos to The Key to Life on Earth and Rapture feature the singer dancing within digital landscapes, often encountering digitised versions of himself and his lookalikes.
Still from Declan McKenna's Lyric music video, 'The Key to Life on Earth'
In a world so highly rocked by the digital, it’s only logical for artistic exhibitions and experiences to expand into these online spaces, which have the freedom to create and adapt to any aesthetics they choose. The technological future is underway, and I’m more than excited to see how it will continue to expand and transform art as we know it.
