Digital Signage and Art – A Modern Medium

While we are all familiar with digital out of home (Dooh) and outdoor digital signage used for marketing, branding, promotion, advertising and information, there are other far less utilitarian uses for digital screens.

With the rise of touch screen and tablet computers like the iPad, digital signage is being used in the art world – not only to display artists work, but also to create it.

David Hockney, the celebrated British artist, has embraced this technology as a way of enabling him to create works and distribute it – doing away with galleries, printing and allowing the artist to get instant responses and critiques to the work.

Hockney, a septuagenarian, has experimented with digital technology for a long time  but has said it is only recently that the speed of computing has allowed work to be created digitally as well as being displayed.

And Hockney isn’t the only one. British stately home Chatsworth House has introduced digital signage and digitally designed work in its art collections. Created by another British artist Michael Craig-Martin, a contemporary conceptual artist, created a digital black line portrait of Laura Burlington, the present Lady Burlington, which was commissioned by Lord Burlington.

The digital signage is used not just to display the portrait but to also transform the line portrait into coloured images. The areas of the image is divided into nine different areas and the digital signage software places different colours into these areas every few seconds, meaning the portrait changes continually and is never the same.