Digital Artist Show-and-Tell featuring Sound Selecta

Posted: November 8, 2011 - 16:45 , by ROM
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This past Friday, the Institute for Contemporary Culture hosted its first ‘Digital Artist Show and Tell’.  Amidst the glimmering iPad drawings in the David Hockney fresh flowers exhibition, over 30 people spontaneously congregated in the Roloff Beny Gallery for an interactive session with Jamie Alexander of Sound Selecta. Sound Selecta is a company that merges art, music and commerce to create some really exciting apps.

Visitors started off deconstructing Beethoven’s Fur Elise with a musical education app that reveals the melodies and chords of this quintessential masterpiece.  Next Jamie showcased reggae and dub-step apps used by producers to construct contemporary pieces – some of the younger audience members dashed up to try out these out for themselves.

Jamie also demo’d a selection of his work with some of art history’s ‘greatest hits’.  Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Jacque-Louis David’s Oath of the  Horatii were given a 21st Century spin, as the figures came to life on the iPad.  With just a few taps, the figures and objects on the background become moveable, allowing the user to rearrange their favourite painting any way they chose. These projects were designed to engage the audience with their favourite artworks.

As a ‘grand finale’, Jamie and his crew dj’d contemporary Persian music while the audience sketched.  The drawings were uploaded into his program, and before we knew it, a new ‘app’ was born.

Join us on Friday, November 11 for the next Show and Tell with Tom Hobson demo’s his fascinating and fun ‘Beat Sneaks’ – something you’ll have to come and see and hear to believe!