On Wednesday 25th January, the second event in the Creative Times Beauty of Digital series took place at the Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol. Chaired by the Studio’s Director, Clare Reddington, it was a lively and thought-provoking evening of talks, followed by a short Q&A session. CT Editor Chris Sharratt provides a snapshot of what was discussed.

The slide reads ‘I am odd!’, beautifully rendered in ITC Caslon Black. “It should say ‘I am old’,” smiles Jonathan Waring, the first speaker at tonight’s Beauty of Digital event, exploring ‘new technologies, old aesthetics and where the two meet’.

Waring is Creative Director at digital creative agency 3Sixty – slogan: ‘Useful, beautiful, digital’. He’s not that old (and he’s certainly not odd), but he is old enough to remember being a designer when things were still done by hand. Crucially, when he was starting out in the early ‘80s, he worked under Ben Bos of Total Design fame. The experience left an indelible mark.

You have to look back to look forward. Old aesthetics aren’t about the past they’re about the future.

Waring’s approach to digital is rooted in a knowledge and appreciation of design history, and that’s the main thrust of his ten minute talk – in order to go forward in a meaningful way, we need to be more aware of the past and recognise the lessons that can be learnt from the pre-digital age. Which is why staff at 3Sixty – a digital agency, remember – are taught Letterpress.

“You have to look back to look forward,” says Waring. “Old aesthetics aren’t about the past they’re about the future.” A little less ‘straight to execution’ and more time spent getting it right, wouldn’t go amiss either.

The historical theme continues with David McGoran (pictured), a roboticist, creative technologist and former dancer. He takes us way back to Ancient Greece and a time, he argues, when the performing arts were at the cutting edge of new developments, and primal human emotions were recognised and well served by technology.

“Computers,” reasons McGoran, “can do difficult things, but find it difficult to do the things we find easy.” Essentially, they don’t do emotion. And no wonder, he continues, with engineering obsessed with logic and a breeding ground for geeks and social misfits.

McGoran suggests that robotocists should be looking back and learning from history, and in particular the work of performing arts innovators such as Jacques Lecoq and Etienne Decroux. And the arts, rather than adapting consumer-focussed technology, should be at the forefront of developing technology that best serves the emotional and physical world of performance.

Baldur Bjarnason, an expert on ebooks and interactivity, begins his ten minutes by challenging the idea of the book as something with a fixed aesthetic and form. “The phrase ‘You can’t judge a book by the cover’ derives from an age when book’s didn’t have covers,” he says.

Citing examples such as when books were unbound and the reader had to separate pages with a knife as they progressed, he makes the case for digital publishing to invent a new form, rather than mimic a relatively recent – in Bjarnason’s view, a modernist idea – of what a book should be: fixed text in a fixed format.

“The iPad’s treatment of books is cartoony and kitsch, it appeals to the emotions rather than logic,” he says, while conceding that it’s for that very reason that it is likely to remain more popular than Microsoft’s clean, grid-based Windows 8 mobile/tablet operating system. The battle for future market share is as much about aesthetics as it is functionality.

Which brings us to zombies, or more specifically, the wonderful world of street and pervasive games makers Slingshot. Simon Johnson, one half of this Bristol-based team, talks about the company’s many projects and how they attempt to use digital technology in such a way that it isn’t really noticed – it’s there to facilitate real-world games that involve running around cities having fun and, in the case of 2.8 Hours Later, being chased by the undead.

Slingshot have used GPS, IP radio, Twitter and other social media in their projects, but the gaming experience itself remains resolutely analogue: “The games aren’t digital, but we can’t make them without the digitally-enabled community of participants,” explains Johnson.

From odd and old to zombies on Facebook – that’s the Beauty of Digital in Bristol. Next stop Newcastle, at The Tyneside Cinema on Thursday 23rd February. Hope to see you there.

Thanks to our friends at Pervasive Media Studio for hosting this event