A pathway through futuristic flashing foliage beckoned me into Decode’s dark rooms. The exhibition began with several displays of the beauty of computational code – a celebration of the medium itself. Digital Zoetrope glowed eerily and mesmerised like a monitor from The Matrix, the occasional word emerging from a chaos of text.

Other exhibits were audience responsive. Solar consisted of a bunch of seemingly sentient spheres that move to your voice. One man got so engrossed he started thumping the microphone. “I want one of these for Christmas!” he said as his partner dragged him away. He wasn’t alone; all around people were playing with big grins on their faces. A 3D Dandelion dispersed its seeds as it got blown with a real hairdryer. A white screen that splashes colour as you cast movements on it brought out the contemporary dancer in everyone. Videogrid, a collection of realtime recorded audience clips showed that we are entering an age where if you act like an idiot, your actions can now be preserved for all eternity.

And we are entering a new age – one where we’re no longer limited to the individual experience. A digital clock on the wall ticked away, each digit being a new photo uploaded from an internet contributor somewhere in the world. You could imagine the same clock appearing simultaneously on their own wall a million miles apart. Elsewhere colourful shifting patterns mapped not computational code, but the stress and polution levels of real city inhabitants – the art that we unwarily create everyday.

It was interesting to see that some of the most engaging artworks were created with commonly available tools such as Maya and C++, a sign that it wasn’t the technology reaping rewards, but imagination and creativity.

Far from being cold and minimalist, my digital art experience resulted in orchestrating a Mexican Wave in front of a projection screen and a five minute gurn into a webcam. It seems that while technology can be beautifully enigmatic, it can also show us just how human we really are.

Henry