MuDA Opens in Zurich
When Caroline Hirt and Christian Etter first met during a video game award show, they quickly came to realise a shared interest. They both saw the artistic potential of technology, and, as Etter said in an interview with us, were equally frustrated with the inexistence of a public space for the digital arts. And so the two then founded the not-for-profit Digital Arts Association to develop a space that would showcase the artistic possibilities of technology, creativity and innovation.
The space would be called the Museum of Digital Art (MuDA), and its home would be in The Migros, Zurich’s first high-rise. While development sat for a while, Hirst and Etter’s idea later caught the eye of Michael Hinderling and Michael Volkart from Switzerland’s most awarded digital agency. Hinderling and Volkart backed MuDA, along with 567 crowd-funding supporters that saw them raise over US$100,000 to bring MuDA to life.
In 2015 MuDA was born, and so was the place to experience the art of numbers and computer languages in their most tangible forms. “We want to build an institute that will host exhibitions featuring artists from across all continents using code to create mind-blowing art at the intersection of science and creativity,” Etter said. And so they did. Now in 2016, Europe’s first museum for digital art has opened its doors to the public with a new exhibition made with 1 and 0s.
The opening exhibition is dedicated to the Swiss artist duo Andreas Gysin and Sidi Vanetti who are renowned for their code generated artworks of maze-like patterns. The exhibition will be filled with objects that have a renewed digital purpose in life, and artworks that will challenge our very notions of what art can be composed with.
The centrepiece for the exhibition is a 13.5 metre long electromechanical split-flap display board that, until October 2015, was used to display departure times at Zurich’s main train station. Reprogrammed, the board will perform a gravity-defying dance composed of its former elements, sounds stations names and more. The centrepiece by Gysin and Vanetti tweaks the digital heartbeat, inviting us to discover everyday urban objects from another perspective. What was once mundane and prosaic has been transformed, diverted from their primary purposes with the seemingly limitless possibilities of code.
As technology changes the world around us, art, of course, has not been an exception. The new exhibition by MuDA offers a front-row seat to art from the clickstream.
The digital works of Gysin-Vanetti is now on show at MuDA in Zurich, Switzerland until Sunday, 21 August 2016.
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