Blogging, Tweeting, IMing, Facebooking, e-conferencing.  The world is filling up rapidly with these brand new verbs.  If tweeting is something you thought limited to small birds and internet nerds then it’s time to shed your luddite ways and add another item to your list of new year’s resolutions – it’s time to get digital.

If you haven’t the first idea how to micro-blog or IM your friend, we promise it doesn’t hurt, but if you were looking for a more cultural introduction to the digital then why not swing by the V&A to take in the remarkable new exhibition Decode: Digital Design Solutions.

Curated in collaboration with onedotzero – an international arts organisation promoting innovation in moving image and interactive arts – Decode is the V&A’s very first exhibition dedicated to digital and interactive artworks, and is presented in partnership with SAP, one of the world’s leading providers of business software. 

The exhibition showcases exciting new media artworks including Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s bafflingly beautiful ‘We Feel Fine‘ – a stunning visualisation of  the ‘feelings’ being expressed in social networking sites around the world – and Aaron Koblin’s ‘Flight Patterns’, a strangely organic graphic realisation of real-time flight paths. 

True to form, Decode has a rich online presence – not least the open source artwork produced by Karsten Schmidt as part of the marketing campaign for the exhibition – Recode Decode – which invites budding digital artists to rework and manipulate the coding to produce their own Decode designs.  You don’t even need to be a coding whizz, a friendly step-by-step Google code page has been set up to help less techy types to give it a whirl.  To round off the journey, users are invited to showcase their designs on social media platforms such as flickr, Twitter and Vimeo with the tag decode09.

Decode has provided SAP with a new creative platform to demonstrate its new ‘clear’ brand, which aims to build greater visibility, transparency and accountability through its broad range of software and services to businesses.  Their partnership with the V&A demonstrates a unique opportunity to mirror their focus on user engagement and data interpretation within culture and new art practices.

Decode runs until 11 April 2010.  To read more about inspirational digital / cultural partnerships visit the Arts & Business Research pages.

Rose Enright