A chance to see your work on the London Underground

The Victoria and Albert Museum has commissioned the artist Karsten Schmidt to design a truly malleable, digital identity for the Decode exhibition by providing it as open source code. We are giving you the opportunity to recode Karsten's work and create your own original artwork. If we love your work it might even become the new Decode identity.

Getting started

The identity application is fully interactive and can be controlled via mouse, keyboard and a graphical user interface. The application lets you manipulate most parameters in realtime to create a variety of different looks and we encourage you to take the time to experiment to create your own version. You do not need to be an expert coder, as Karsten has included a detailed user guide for changing each of the parameters via the user interface and provided some pointers to make changes to the code itself. Follow the steps below to take part, and then send your recoded work to us for inclusion in our digital gallery. The V&A reserves the right not to display any works deemed unsuitable.

A number of the recoded works submitted to us will be chosen by the V&A and CBS to appear on London Underground digital screens to promote the exhibition. Each work used in this way will appear fully credited with the name of its artist.

Media partner CBS

Step 1

Go to the Decode page on Google code: http://decode.googlecode.com (You're here already! :)

Step 2

Download Karsten’s original application & source code and read the user guide here on our wiki.

Step 3

Open the application and start changing the parameters to create different effects. Alternatively open the source code and make more fundamental changes to it. Read the development guide for full information.

Step 4

Package up your recoded work and email it to us at mailto:decodedigital@googlemail.com.

Detailed export instructions can be found in the development guide

Get in touch

If you prefer, record your recoded images as a video or still image and upload it onto Vimeo, flickr, or twitter about it using the tag decode09. Please email it to us though too as we’d love to include the work on our gallery. Thanks!

License

This software has been released under the copyleft GNU General Public License v3. The full license text is included with each download. Regardless of your plans to make modifications for re-submission to this project or not, if you make modifications to the code & plan to distribute them, please make sure you understand your rights.