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Classic Artwork Gets A Digital Makeover In New Art Exhibition

Intel and Jotta team up to give a digital twist to some classic paintings from masters old and modern.

Currently exhibiting at One Marylebone in London is a series of digital reinterpretations of classic art works. Remastered, a collaboration between Intel and British art and design community Jotta, aims to explore how 21st century technologies can be used to interpret old masterpieces by getting a series of emerging artists and designers to remaster them. Instantly recognizable classics like Edvard Munch’s The Scream and Dali's The Persistence of Memory get wholly transformed into something else, reformatted using 3D animation, reactive visuals, and modern software. The end result often renders the pieces completely unrecognizable, with only hints left pointing you to their previous form. Here’s a selection of some of the works on show:

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Daniel Swan used After Effects to render Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory into an installation piece comprising three screens that display floating amorphous forms and brushstrokes, with the shapeless matter mimicking Dali’s soft clocks and a color palette derivative of the original painting. Dali’s fleeting dreamscapes are aptly conveyed in the non-forms slowly shifting across the screens.

Art collective Midnight Toastie used OpenFrameworks, Arduino, LEDs, a projector, and webcam to create an interactive re-imagining of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. The webcam tracks the viewer’s movements and that, in turn, activates a constellation of electronic lights in the picture, which appear in contrast with the textiles used in the foreground. Audrey Anastasy from the collective said, "Van Gogh’s brushstroke technique requires the colours to be created in the viewer's eye—that is a perfect example of interaction that we wanted to translate."

Stuart Bailes took Johannes Vermeer’s The Astronomer which, like many of Vermeer’s paintings made use of the camera obscura technique to faithfully convey light and shadows, and reinterpreted the painting as photography. The ghostly images look like a series of monolithic gravestones, especially in the presence of the former church’s stained glass windows. The pictures were created using a film-based camera but technology was present as a concept, like in the binary nature of the lines and shadows.

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Vanessa Harden reinterpreted Raphael’s The School of Athens as a sculptural installation. Using Adobe CS4 Suite to create the map and imagery, she picked contemporary figures, each one a winner of TIME magazine’s Person of the Year award, and created a maze of links between them. The links are meant to be a physical representation of the people’s relationships to one another, usually provided via the hyperlink on the web, placing this flow of knowledge outside the context of the usual form for this type of networked information.

Eric Schockmel took Rain, Steam and Speed—The Great Western Railway by J.M.W. Turner and turned it into a 3D animation (above). He used Maxon Cinema 4D, Adobe After Effects, along with Adobe Audition and Adobe Premiere Pro for sound design to create an eerie animation of a train in motion, punctuated by abstract forms and different shapes and set in a blazing yellow landscape. The hanging ending hints at the prospect of a technological singularity, when machines become sentient.

Chris Harris, or Lung, turned Edvard Munch’s The Scream into a multimedia sculpture, using Adobe After Effects and Logic Studio. The battered remains of a colorful brick wall are embedded with video loops of famous screams from popular culture like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone and the masks from Scream. The dilapidated wall’s decline is further hinted at by the appearance of mysterious brown blobs, looking like strange creatures have fouled upon it. He says “This work takes on the form of a decrepit wall, a once monolithic theme park appendage. I’ve drawn a line between Munch’s central character in The Scream, and tried to offset that with imagery that is iconic today.”

Remastered will be open until 13 March at One Marylebone, 1 Marylebone Road, London, NW1 4AQ

Photos: Alexis Hamilton