There’s no digital revolution here

On the hottest day of the summer so far, I found that even the simple technological feature of air conditioning meant I was already in a good mood as I turned up for the Barbican Centre’s new hi-tech exhibition. I was a little taken aback by the concept of having to queue even though we had booked in advance for a specific time slot but, I told myself, at least this means they’re limiting the amount of people in order to optimise our experience. Although this probably was true, I found that once inside there really were just too many people to make the most of it.

The first section is a chronological display of computer technology, starting with arcade games of the 1970s. One defining feature of the exhibition is that the public are encouraged to have a go. Happy to wait for the popular features like the arcade-style Pacman game, it did start to get irritating when people seemed to be hogging such attractions, leaving us to re-read descriptions of old computer systems that really didn’t mean much to me, and which didn’t inspire without application. When one couple re-started Pacman for the third time in a row, I did what any disgruntled Brit would do: I sighed loudly and moved on to the next section. Despite this, it was fascinating to see how technology had evolved and to get the chance to interact with old systems, especially as I was obviously too young to have experienced most of it the first time around. Newer features included the original Sims PC game that was particularly nostalgic for me, although to my dismay there was no keyboard connected, and how on earth was I to earn any money without being able to type in the ‘rosebud’ cheat?

There were some interesting and varied features in the next sections of the exhibition but I often found that I didn’t really know what I was looking at or listening to as not enough detail was given. For example, we were ushered into a room showing an original piece by will.i.am, but with little explanation all I witnessed was an overbearingly loud song with a giant face on the wall surrounded by some crazy patterns. Many of the attractions I expect would appeal to people who are more interested in specific technical details. As a film student, I was intrigued at first by the behind-the-scenes look at Hollywood’s Gravity, but found I wasn’t really in the mood to stand around a gallery merely watching what appeared to be a DVD-extra documentary.

One highlight was the trio of giant screens which visitors stand in front of to watch themselves be transformed into a silhouette and subsequently be decomposed by a swarm of tiny birds before having to flap their arms and turn into a giant bird themselves and fly away into nothingness. Unfortunately, again, the queues for this were long enough for me to be satisfied with watching a few others take on the experience so wasn’t actually able to interact with the piece myself. The Indie Games Space was also a nice idea as people could sit down for as long as they wished to play quirky, low-budget PC games, and it was off the beaten track enough for us to be able to play a couple without having to wait too long.

Ironically, the thing that let down the so-called revolutionary exhibition was that quite a few things just didn’t seem to work. At least two of the indie game screens were blank, a digital ‘Twitter skirt’ invited guests to plug in their phones so the clothing could display live tweets using the phone app, yet such a cord was nowhere to be seen. My advice would be to go on a weekday if possible, and perhaps only if you’re interested in the inner workings of digital tech rather than going with the expectation that your mind will be blown. For the student price of £8.50 I feel I got enough for my money but my expectations for what I expected to be a ground-breaking exhibition were not quite met.

Digital Revolution runs at the Barbican Centre until September 14^th