Last week, Frameless, an art gallery in Marble Arch, hosted fourteen different works from a selection of the graduating class the Royal College of Art for their MA in Digital Direction and Showcase.
The gallery itself is famed for its immersive approach to art as surround sound reverberates around three walls of moving pictures – this evening was no different and showcased the works of newly graduated artists’ works.
Emma Rose Harvey – one of the graduating digital artists – described her work ‘A Dream Within A Dream’ as an installation combining “experimental storytelling, sensory manipulation and digital environments to explore how attention, memory, perception, identity, language and technology shape our understanding of ourselves and the world around us”.
She explained it was inspired by the “fabric of reality and what we perceive in our world built up on top of each other.” And after identifying her three layers – first perception, second identity, third systems – she toyed with how these parts influence our perceptions of reality and what we determine to be objective or real.
She also wanted to include the audience as a narrative medium, using subconscious associations with the imagery, sounds and narration as forming half of the narrative experience, with the other half coming from each specific audience member experiencing it.
Other works from the evening included ‘Tide Within Me’ by Fanged (Andy) Liu – which reflected the emotional depths of relationships between mothers and daughters and the transitional generational changes through matrilineal lines.
Her story was translated through a science fiction narrative with an imagined moon existing in its own solar system where matrilineal lines coalesce in tandem with one another becoming what she explained as “vessels of love, memory, and embodied knowledge.”
The graduating students of this MA course were tasked with reimagining storytelling given the leaps of technology in our time – each piece I saw was colourful, unique and inspiring – I think especially in a world where AI is threatening art, this proves artistic innovation will always come first.
Featured image credit: Lucy McCulloch
