What:
The Gallery of Lost Art, an immersive online exhibition which reveals the stories behind lost artworks from some of the world’s most famous artists, has won the Interactive Art Award at South by Southwest (SXSW), the world’s largest interactive media festival.

Designed by ISO for Tate in partnership with Channel4, the innovative project takes the form of a virtual gallery, bringing together fragments of lost treasures to be explored online.

Each item, now destroyed, stolen, or erased from the real world, is shown on a table that contains an array of media fragments – all that is left of the original artworks. They include artist’s notes and letters, archive images and videos, eyewitness reports and press reviews. The tables are grouped in thematic areas, each dealing with a concept around loss in art.

Visitors are free to explore the individual pieces by unpacking each table and exploring the digital assets released; building a personal interpretation of the artworks as they reveal the stories behind each incident. Stacks of pictures can be revealed, high-resolution images zoomed into and explored and rich media clips played back, with supporting curatorial essays. A visitor blog allows users to ‘see behind the scenes’ of the exhibition, post their own contributions and links to the project, and engage with the curatorial staff.

A richly interactive and multi-layered experience, the project so impressed the SXSW judging panel in Austin, Texas, that the British production outshone some very strong entries from major players such as Disney, Cirque du Soleil and MoMA to win the Interactive Art award.

Jane Burton, creative director at Tate Media, said: “We had stiff competition for the award, so winning was fantastic. I’m really proud of the project and of our collaborators, the brilliant Glasgow-based agency ISO Design, who put so much into this. I hope that winning will bring The Gallery of Lost Art to a whole new audience.”

Tate and Channel4’s collaboration on The Gallery of Lost Art is rooted in a shared commitment to high quality arts content, creativity and digital innovation. As the Tate’s first purely online exhibition, it has given the gallery unprecedented insight into online user behaviour and the demand for deep and rich curated content. Channel4 is to broadcast documentaries specially created within the project as part of its ‘Shooting Gallery’ strand.

The Gallery of Lost Art shows how archives can be unlocked and explored in innovative, non-linear ways by audiences and how digital tools can be used to create installations impossible to host in the real world.

The project itself will become ‘lost’ when the site is destroyed in July, leaving behind a trail of digital fragments. The Gallery of Lost Art will live on as both an iBook and a physical book.

For now however, the project is still live and can be accessed here.

Find out more:
Website | Blog | Facebook | Twitter

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For more creative delights we’ve Spotted on the web take a look here.

Led by Matt Adams, Ju Row Farr and Nick Tandavanitj, the group’s work explores interactivity and confronts a media-saturated world in which popular culture rules, using performance, installation, video, mobile and online technologies to ask questions about the ideologies present in the information that surrounds us.

I’d Hide You (2012) commission from The Space, a BBC / Arts Council England initiative

Why we like it:
Blast Theory is innovative and has a strong track record of taking major artistic risks – in Kidnap (1998), for example two members of the public were kidnapped as part of a lottery and the resulting event was streamed online. They have tackled themes of violence, pornography and politics.

A Machine To See With (2010) commission from the Sundance Film Festival, 01 San Jose Biennial and the Banff New Media Institute

In Blast Theory’s film, A Machine To See With (2010) participants play the lead in a heist. Participants signed up online with their mobile phone numbers. On the day, they received an automated call giving them an address to go to. From there, a series of calls instructed participants through the city, they hid money inside public lavatories on the way, met up with a partner in crime and onwards to the bank, the tension rising. This seems like an utterly unique experience as it’s up to the individual participants to deal with the bank robbery and its aftermath.

Find out more:
Website | Vimeo | Flickr | Facebook | Twitter

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For more creative delights we’ve Spotted on the web take a look here.

What:
For SOUNDWORKS, the ICA invited over a hundred artists to submit an audio work taking inspiration from the themes evoked in Bruce Nauman’s seminal sound installation Days.

SOUNDWORKS is an online platform that doubles as a virtual exhibition space. The project includes a wide range of approaches by artists who have been working with the medium for years, as well as artists producing sound art for the first time.

Why we like it:
A beautifully sleek and minimal interactive site which allows the user to enjoy the art of sound without being distracted by visuals. You can also easily share your favourites on Twitter and Facebook.

Find out more:
Website | Facebook | Twitter

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For more creative delights we’ve Spotted on the web take a look here.

The space is also home to the MadeinRoath arts festival headquarters. A community festival with interactive exhibits. Highlights from last year’s festival included the Open House art trail, artist Jennie Savage’s Guide to Getting Lost in Roath at Milkwood Gallery, SWN festival’s showcase at The Globe, a sound installation in Roath Park’s conservatory and Roath’s first pop up arthouse cinema at Milgi.

Milkwood’s firmly established alternative, eclectic space where visitors can enjoy art, craft and design in a welcoming, friendly environment. They have also hosted Gallery based workshops for local schools and groups as well as ‘make do and mend’ courses: the learning of traditional skills whilst also encouraging sustainability.

Current projects include In Hand by Heloise Godfrey. An experiment involving massaging people and recording the sound of the experience and stories that they tell.

Carboard House is also currently running and invites designers from any discipline to propose showing an object from their own ‘household’ collection juxtaposed with an original household object which they have designed and made out of cardboard.

visit the milkwood website.

Interactive Media @ Dundee Degree Show via imd.dundee.ac.uk

Being a fellow graduate this year – eca, sculpture – this was me checking out the competition. (This is unbiased, promise). Having not been before, I didn’t really have any expectations – these are usually dangerous things to have anyway.

So, after last years expedition down the steps and towards the Tay (I have connections) the degree show is back within the college grounds, swallowed up by the winding corridors and studios everywhere that – my stupidity aside – were rather difficult to negotiate.

(Rather than giving a room-by-room, department-by-department run through of the show, this is my overview of the exhibition, taking into consideration that I’m horrible with remember names, details and everything else that would be useful to anybody.)

Primarily, I was disappointed with fine art as a whole. As I have found with other degree shows – gsa, eca, london schools etc – there are usually a few works/people that either stand out or at least have something interesting about them. Though, to say everything was uninteresting within Fine Art would be a rather harsh and sweeping statement, but generally nothing excited me. There was a slight un-polished finish to a lot of the work – generally a degree show trait – like they were expecting to be down the road again, but didn’t quite make it. (I don’t know the story here, so I’m only guessing).

Brushing this department aside – and again taking my forgetfulness into considerations – the highlight/redeeming part of the show was the Interactive Media department that, though off my tracks somewhat, provided design that was thoughtful, interesting and engaging. (There’s a link at the bottom; they’re all worth a look).

Overall, it was a bit disappointing, suggestive that the design departments of Dundee are producing students who are in turn producing work that is more deserving and demanding of attention.

Interactive Media