UK-based digital media artist Andrea Zapp is currently showcasing her new works in the Mumbai city

DIGITAL ART ON YOU

UK-based digital media artist Andrea Zapp is currently showcasing her new works in the city

    Unusual, appealing and thoughtful — these are the words that come to your mind when you look at the works of UK-based digital media artist Andrea Zapp. Her exhibition Third Skin: An Exhibition of Textile Media Sculpture is about the digital and online identities of our lives. In a chat with BT, the artist talks about digital media and art.
Why have you titled your exhibition ‘Third
Skin’? There was a first version of the project in which I focused solely on the internet and satellite imagery for the fabric design. This was to reflect online habitats we all live in, our digital life through social media and networks. We have our own skin and identity, our first one, the second one is our environment and architecture. The third skin, in this case, is bringing back the digital onto the body to refer to our new virtual identities — our third layer in existence, so to say.
What inspires you? My surroundings, travel, modernist art, colours and shapes that give me ideas about patterns and forms for this kind of project. The ambiguity of a p h o t o g r ap h i c image that changes its form and outlook on fabric, distorting rules of perspective and issues of reality when printed.
Media-based textile art — please tell us more about it. I use the fabric as another screen to work with digital imagery. I always had a focus on narrative structures in my digital art work, a story is told or experienced through mixed forms of media, in metaphors. I am also interested in analogue-digital relationships of making. The digital is reflected, but the manufacture and product is very physical. The Third Skin project also has strong elements of design in it, obviously. I am not a fashion designer, but now I have to think about shapes and form of a garment in relation to visual art, which is new and just a starting point to take me to something else.
Why an exhibition in India? What do you
have to say about the Indian art scene? As I am exploring textile in its various forms at present, I went on a research trip to Gujarat earlier this year. I worked with a range of artisans there, who collaborated with me on designing wood blocks from my photography for printing fabric. In turn, as part of a dialogue, I made Indian-inspired garments from it, as well as a video with all the films from my trip about the breadth of textile crafts up there. So my view of the Indian art scene is very craft-orientated at the moment. The exhibition at The Loft here also goes back to contacts from Ahmedabad, where I met the curator.
Do you think that the outlook towards
media-based art has undergone a change? Yes, mostly in the field of interactive media arts, as we know it from its heydays as larger scale digital installations. Media art of today is very much about networking.
Programming language has become very accessible. Media art has also become more sculptural and merges more with contemporary art, which I think is really interesting. There are many hybrid formats now.
What is your message for
upcoming media-based artists? They need to develop an individual language and profile that the audience can clearly recognise. To make distinctions between design and media arts, it is not necessarily the same. Social networking sites are also not media art. It’s essential to research the history of media arts and its key institutions and artists since the 80s to be aware of crucial developments and ideas — to look at it as an experiment.
    The exhibition is on at The Loft, New
    Mahalaxmi Silk Mills Mathuradas Mills
    Compound, Tulsi Pipe Road, Lower Parel,
    Mumbai, till September 30.

Andrea Zapp