This term the students, staff and alumni from Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon who make up the Digital Maker Collective will be collaborating on a series of exciting events as part of Tate Exchange, an annual programme of public events that takes place at Tate Modern’s new Switch House building, that brings together international artists and over 50 partners who work within and beyond the arts.
The Digital Maker Collective are an open group who share common goals of exploring digital and emerging technologies in the context of arts, education, society and the creative industries. For Tate Exchange, they will be inviting visitors to take part in digital experiments, performances, interventions, and conversation at interdisciplinary pop-up gatherings, and explore everything digital including virtual and augmented reality, creating artificial creatures and using microcomputers and biofeedback devices to create interactive objects.
Alejandro Escobar is a student on MA Fine Art Digital, and is a member of the Collective. For Tate Exchange, he will give a talk about the use of Virtual Reality (VR) in his work as well as show a current project which the public can explore themselves through VR.
We spoke to Alejandro about how he combines traditional panting and sculptural techniques with digital technology.
I have been a painter for the last ten years: I started by embracing a realistic style but it has shifted in the last few years as I have started experimenting with materials and techniques. My subject is the visual representation of reality, although recently I started to focusing more on how to physically represent memories.
On each of the four dates that the Digital Maker Collective will be running Tate Exchange events, the public will have the opportunity to take part in a VR presentation of my ongoing project exploring painting and VR technology in which I am creating a painted interactive world that people are able to navigate with a VR head set, and on 8 March at 1pm I will also give a formal presentation entitled Painting in VR, which will be an exploration of this approach.