Curator's Choice: Irini Papadimitriou on the beauty and inspiration of the Victoria & Albert Museum

This article originally appeared on Culture24.

Irini Papadimitriou, the Digital Programmes Manager at the Victoria & Albert Museum, on digital art, knitting and finding inspiration

“It is quite extraordinary to be based in such a beautiful building and surrounded by so many wonderful objects. The V&A is fascinating, but what I find particularly exciting is contemporary objects the Museum collects for example as part of the Rapid Response Collecting strand.

We work with many audience groups, from kids, young people, students to adults and older people, so there is a great diversity in what we do. The Digital Programmes Team was formed in 2008, around the same time as the opening of the Sackler Centre for Arts Education at the V&A. We were given a lot of freedom to create programmes to engage audiences with our collections, but also enable them to explore, learn and be creative with technology.

We had the opportunity to pilot quite a few projects, and initiate fun workshops to encourage audiences to learn about design processes and gain new skills through activities inspired by the collections and current exhibitions. Participants can create their own digital art with help from artists and designers, using a variety of software packages and online tools.

Of my favourite works inspired by the collections, Knyttan & Common Works made Recounted – an oral sampler  using Knyttan’s groundbreaking knitting technology. Speaking, singing or chanting by audiences was captured in the space and automatically converted into traditional Scottish-inspired knitting patterns from the museum collections. These patterns were knitted and the sampler was displayed at the V&A. It’s a beautiful piece.

At this year’s Digital Design Weekend we had the 2014 Prix Ars Electronica winner Matthew Plummer-Fernandez. His mixed media installation explores an infinite, digital, 3D V&A collection that may soon exist.

There was also Tom Schofield and his brilliant Marginalia Machine, a drawing robot that reproduces margin notes from the Bloodaxe Archive of contemporary poetry, and Michael Burton and Michiko Nitta, whose installation was based on research using living technologies to extract resources from contaminated wastelands. People should also check out Invisible Flock, a great interactive art collective based in Leeds.

The most exciting part of the job is to bring in so many artists, designers, academics and people we collaborate with. This is how events like the Digital Design Weekend or the Digital Design Drop-in started.

There are so many interesting things happening in the museum. It’s a constant source of inspiration.”

• The Digital Performance Weekend takes place at Watermans, London on November 14-15 2015. Find out about the British Council’s UKMX programme.

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Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/art540883-curator-choice-irini-victoria-albert-digital