Recode: Creating open source digital art

Member David Gamble is CD at SAINT @ RKCR/Y&R.  Way back in 1999 he launched the New Blood identity while at Circus.  His latest project is Recode for Decode, an exhibition of digital design at the V&A until 11 April.  

Karsten Schmidt was asked to design an open source digital identity for Decode.  The aim was to encourage others to play with Schmidt's code and create an original digital artwork of their own. 

How does Recode fit with work you've done before?

For the last 15 years, my creative partner Simon Labbett and I have tried to come up with ideas that do whatever it takes to earn the right to engage with the audience, rather than just using specific media channels to try and force engagement. We have often used traditional media as part of this (sometimes the main part), as it has the breadth that some campaigns need, but we always try to accompany it with other more targeted ways to win that engagement battle. Digital has always been at the heart of what we do as it allows us to engage with people in so many different ways, and on more personal terms.

Recode was different from our previous work, mainly because we hadn’t encountered these sets of problems in the past, or had to engage with this relatively niche audience before. These factors - combined with a very tiny budget - led to our creative solution. We wouldn’t have devised the same campaign if circumstances were different (and if we had 3 million quid to play with). 

We wanted to demonstrate the things that make digital art so different from more traditional art. Try interacting with a Monet at the The National Gallery and you’ll get arrested. Do the same at Decode and you’re adding to the exhibition. Anyone can have an effect on digital art, so we used that as our starting point. We wanted to open up every aspect of the campaign to our audience, and let them promote the exhibition for us.

What were the main challenges you had to overcome?

The biggest challenge was the budget. It was tiny compared to our ambitions. But we turned this into a positive, as the small budget was one of the main factors that led to the idea. We couldn’t have achieved everything we did without creating an open source campaign.

How did you find Karsten Schmidt?
We needed to get a respected digital artist involved to create the art application for Recode, so the V&A suggested using Karsten, who was already one of the contributors to Decode. We worked closely with him to make sure the application did everything we needed for the campaign and the collaborative art idea. His influence really helped the idea spread to a receptive audience.

Did you notice any trends or themes around the work submitted or by who submitted it?
The Recoded submissions got better and more ambitious as people got to grips with the application and the code. We wanted to make sure that there was a low barrier to interaction with digital art piece, but a relatively high barrier to outputting a finished piece of Recoded work. 

We needed quality, not quantity in the Recode gallery as we didn’t have the resources to deal with tens of thousands of uploads. This meant that although thousands downloaded the art piece, played with it, and passed it on, it was mainly our target audience of flash designers, coders, digital artists, and people with a higher digital understanding that uploaded Recodes to the gallery. They set the bar pretty high and created a competitive element that made the work even better. Just look at the latest piece by Matt Swoboda, it’s fantastic, and has raised the bar even higher. 

We even noticed other digital artists from the Decode exhibition submitting pieces off their own backs. The ripple effect was the most important facet of the campaign. This all comes back to our objectives and use of niche targeting to create a wider buzz beyond the core target audience.

What's next for Recode?

The Decode exhibition is still going, so make sure you go before it finishes. It’s an amazing collection, and has inspired some of our creatives to produce some really interesting work.

We’re hoping to organise a ‘V&A Lates’ for Recode to show all the best work, and invite Karsten and all the other digital artists to meet in the real world for a change. Displaying the Recoded work alongside the exhibition would really complete the campaign for me, and truly blur the lines between product and promotion.

Can you give us a 'dummy's guide' to open source and how it can be used effectively?

I’ll hand over to Chris Jefford to answer the geeky questions...

Open source is a method of freely sharing code to a wider development audience with the goal of improving the finished product through personal input from many sources.  

When a computer programme is created, the building blocks with which it is built with is called Source Code - be that Java, C, Actionscript etc.  This source code is ultimately compiled and becomes an executable application - which is in effect locked-down, un-editable code.  However if the source code of an application is made available, this means that the application itself can be adapted by whoever has that code, and enhanced by whoever has access.  

Most development houses (think Microsoft) handle all their development in-house, and only make the finished applications available, never the source code.  An application such as the popular browser Firefox however has been developed from a basic browser into a major force, by making the original source code available to anyone who wants to develop it, and taking in developments from across the world.  True open source code is available to all, including all changes made through its lifecycle.

In an online world where crowd-sourcing is fast becoming an accepted part of life, open source development projects are set to become widespread in their appeal since there is now an almost limitless pool of potential developers ready to work on a project.  

With respect to the V&A work, we knew that there would be a wealth of creative developers who would love to get their hands on the source of Karsten Schmidt’s work. This should be particularly interesting to students as the main benefits are that open source material is free, and you don’t have to start from scratch to create something new and engaging.

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