In recent years, exhibitions at home and abroad that focus on immersive experiences have soared. When art is no longer limited to edifying people, but integrates the public into the work; when the art museum no longer tries to instill knowledge in an elite posture, but stimulates the senses of the exhibition, encouraging the public to share the experience on social networks, then does the art museum become a visual playground? Can technology bring true artistic immersion? Immersive exhibitions, is it the future of art, or is it a theme park with high ticket prices?
Based on an immersive exhibition being held at the Serpentine Gallery in London, this article extends the art industry's thinking on this phenomenon: there are those who dismiss it as shallow, and there are also explorers who see it as a business model.
Immersive Van Gogh exhibition
In london's Serpentine Gallery, the smell of wood smoke floats in the air, a strange soundtrack is heard in the ears, and a holographic alien dances in space. The exhibition prepares five VR devices for the viewer, each simulating a different alien life, and with VR glasses on, you will feel surrounded by a cluster of blue pixels that drift like jellyfish, and the instability is like neurons being massaged.
This is a visiting experience of the immersive exhibition "Alienarium 5" by French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, which is being held by the Serpentine Gallery. In recent years, installation art that utilizes technologies such as augmented and virtual reality to "immerse" audiences, combining the physical world with digital experiences, has become very popular. Elaborate high-tech installations make the artist's work no longer high and low.
London Serpentine Gallery, "Alienarium 5" exhibition site
"This exhibition is mixed reality — it's both virtual and physical. It involves the sense of touch, smell, and all sorts of things that you can't have on the screen in front of you. Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Gallery, said. After experiencing intermittent social isolation due to the coronavirus, those immersive sensory activities have re-engaged the public. People want to get "things you can't experience in front of a computer at home." Little Hans said.
Installation artists have a long history of collaborating with new technologies, and Hans Jr. cites Billy Klüver, an engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, who has collaborated with artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Yvonne Rainer to create dynamic sculptures and soundscapes. Contemporary artists such as James Turrell and Olafur Eliason use light to construct mechanism installations that make the white box space ecstatic.
For immersion art, many curators and art critics will mention Random International's "rain house" and believe that it is it that promotes this art form to art institutions. The "Rain House" debuted at London's Barbican Centre in 2012 with great success, and since then, this installation that allows people to walk in the rain without getting drenched has become a city-wide hotspot every time they go. Justin McGuirk, curator of the Design Museum in London, said: "The 'Rain House' is very popular, people are waiting in long lines, and many art and culture institutions also hope to exhibit the 'Rain House' to attract more audiences."
Random International's "Rain House"
While the Serpentine Gallery's exhibitions are free to open, most immersive exhibitions tend to be commercial events that charge exorbitant tickets. For example, as the most well-known artist Van Gogh, exhibitions about his immersive experience have been staged in many places around the world, and usually the organizers will use the "concept of reshaping the museum" to let Van Gogh's self-portrait float to the canvas through projection, or project the brush strokes of sunflowers on a static vase... Similar exhibitions are like touring performances, where a space can often be rented to set up a stage.
In such exhibitions, the life of the artist becomes a program run of labels, schemas, and phrases. However, the visitors did not seem to mind, and from time to time exclaimed "so beautiful". Such exhibitions often create a space at the end where visitors can sit on the ground, and in van Gogh's case, the organizers project a rotating close-up of Starry Night on the canvas around them, accompanied by concertos, in an effort to create the atmosphere of the moment. But the overall impression of the exhibition is casual, with organizers not having a discussion of art itself, secularizing Van Gogh as a "rock star" and listing its high prices on the auction floor.
FeverUp did an immersive Van Gogh exhibition in London
Entertainment platform FeverUp is one of the organizers of such immersive exhibitions, they emphasize civic culture, make "accessible" art, and invite Internet users to vote on the immersive exhibitions they want to see, the Van Gogh, Dalí and Titanic exhibitions are currently on tour, and this year also plans to launch Frida and Diego Rivera, Klimt. The current Saturday regular ticket for the Van Gogh Experience is £25.
These immersive installations do not rely on the display of rare artifacts and can be almost reproduced on an industrial scale. Theoretically, just by owning the copyright, it can be displayed anywhere in the world, and the technology platform has a significant advantage in dissemination and popularization compared to traditional museums and art galleries. "During the pandemic, the gaming industry has boomed. The art industry is also well aware of this and is aware of the success of streaming platforms such as Netflix in sharing cultural forms. Kay Watson, director of the art technology program at the Serpentine Gallery, said. The project released a report in January 2020 examining how art exhibitions can be brought closer to the operating model of theme parks. The report's authors write: "This may raise the question of what is true art and 'art space'?" ”
Immersive exhibitions transform "art" into "content" and encourage the public to share it on social media. This model has been repeatedly criticized in the industry, but it cannot stop the surge in popularity, and the driving force behind it is undoubtedly an economic factor.
Many art institutions are currently under pressure to fund and the number of visitors, and there is an urgent need to cater to the audience to gain popularity and investor attention. The audience is easily influenced by the Internet KOL (Internet celebrity), and the organizers do what they like, setting up a "punch point" in the exhibition to guide the audience to take the same photo.
Museums and galleries have also realized the importance of "user-generated content" (UGC, where users display their own original content through Internet platforms or make it available to other users) in the dissemination. As artist Dena Yago wrote in a 2018 article, "A company's marketing plan may include a call to 'user-generated content,' and the response is usually selfies, scene photos, and videos posted on social networks." "Inevitably, works of art suitable for posting 'punch cards' tend to be immersive, such as 'Rain House', Yayoi Kusama's 'House of Infinite Mirrors', Pipilotti Rist's 'Pixel Forest' and James Terrell's work."
Some in the art industry are optimistic that immersive installations could allow artists (or art producers) to stop earning money from selling their work. Instead, artists can charge visitors for experiential art, even bypassing traditional art institutions. The Tokyo TeamLab team is already doing just that, an interdisciplinary team of more than 500 artists, designers, and technologists known for presenting saturated and brilliant light installations. In 2018, it cooperated with the Japanese urban landscape developer "Mori Building · MORI Building has joined hands to launch the "MORI Building Digital Art Museum" in Roppongi, Tokyo. Today, teamLab has opened immersive art spaces in Shanghai and Macau, exhibited in Paris, Prague, Barcelona, New York, and plans to launch "Europe's largest digital art museum" in Hamburg, Germany, in 2024.
teamLab, "Immeasurable Life - One Whole Year Per Year"
Another team that pioneered the Immersive Art Experience program, called Superblue, was co-founded in 2020 by Marc Glimcher, president and CEO of Pace Gallery, and Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, former president of Pace London, which already has experience spaces in Miami and London, and converted from warehouses at its Miami Experience Center. Visitors travel through British stage designer Es Devlin's mirror maze, arrive at teamLab's interactive floral light installation The Immeasurable Life – One Full Year a Year, and Terrell's large-scale installation of light, space and colour, Ganzfeld ("Global"). "In the past, galleries held art exhibitions to sell works." Grimcher said, "In the field of music today, you can download a song for 99 cents; in the art world, for $25 for a ticket to an immersive art experience, the artist's income is not from the sale of the work itself, but as a share of the ticket revenue." We are also wondering if there is a business model for the experiential art world. ”
A.A. Murakami's large-scale experiential installation "Silent Autumn Day"
Currently, Tokyo Artist Duo A.A. Murakami's Silent Fall with "Silent Fall" is being held at the "Superblue" experience centre in London. It is an intoxicating ethereal forest of mechanical trees, and in order to be in this "fantasy forest", there are often long queues outside the exhibition hall. According to Margot Mottaz, the project's curator, the artist wanted to use the machine tree to dissolve the boundary between technology and nature, with complex chemical elements forming bubbles with a forest atmosphere that evaporate into smoke when they float to the ground, triggering the joy of interaction. Visitors can walk through the device, blow bubbles as they go, or even wear gloves to hold bubbles in their arms. Maybe in the fast-paced era, it is rare to be able to get real immersion and concentration, but in terms of art, is it a bit shallow?
Note: This article is compiled from the British newspaper The Guardian