RANDOM INTERNATIONAL, 'Rain Room', 2012. Exhibited at The Curve, Barbican, London.

Talk

Digital environments in contemporary art

Bill Viola / Michelangelo: Life, Death, Rebirth

Wednesday 6 February 2019 6.30 - 7.45pm

The Benjamin West Lecture Theatre, Burlington Gardens, Royal Academy of Arts

£15/£9

Booking for Friends of the RA opens at 10am on Wednesday 21 November 2018. Booking for the public opens at 10am on Tuesday 27 November 2018.

Bill Viola / Michelangelo

Go to the exhibition

Explore what it means to encourage and experience immersion through digital art environments and discover how future technologies have helped shape immersive art.

Bill Viola’s video installations are immersive environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound, always employing technology that was contemporary at the time of the work’s conception.

Our panel, including Charmian Griffin, Head of Digital at Artangel, and the founders of RANDOM INTERNATIONAL, Hannes Koch and Florian Ortkrass use our Bill Viola / Michelangelo: Life, Death, Rebirth exhibition as a starting point to question the limitations and opportunities of both immersive and digital art. How does digital art create immersive environments? What do we understand immersive art to be now and how has it developed alongside digital practices?

The Panel will be chaired by Jessica Rutterford, Adult Learning Programmer at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Panellists:

Charmian Griffin is Head of Digital at Artangel, a London-based organisation that creates extraordinary art in unexpected places. She produced their first major online work Jerusalem by Paul Pfeiffer in 2014 and their first networked project Red Lines by Evan Roth in 2018. She independently produces web projects with artists and arts organisations, teaches art criticism at Central Saint Martins, and writes on art and technology.

RANDOM INTERNATIONAL run a collaborative studio for experimental practice within contemporary art. Founded in 2005 by Hannes Koch and Florian Ortkrass, they work with larger teams of diverse and complementary talent out of studios in London and Berlin. Questioning aspects of identity and autonomy in the post-digital age, the group’s work invites active participation. RANDOM INTERNATIONAL explores the human condition in an increasingly mechanised world through emotional yet physically intense experiences. The artists aim to prototype possible behavioural environments by experimenting with different notions of consciousness, perception and instinct.

£15/£9

Booking for Friends of the RA opens at 10am on Wednesday 21 November 2018. Booking for the public opens at 10am on Tuesday 27 November 2018.