Sit back with a Van Gogh cocktail and let the fun begin.
A new—for America—solution to this frustrating gallery experience is coming to the Indianapolis Museum of Art in June of this year. The museum is permanently dedicating the entirety of its 30,000 square-foot fourth floor to immersive digital art exhibitions, of the sort that are increasingly popular in Europe and Asia, but still a rarity in the US.
Written content by Lucy Alexander for Robb Report
Much of the time, the experience of looking at Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, which hangs in pride of place at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, involves squinting at it from afar while being jostled by school trips and tourists. You’d be lucky to glimpse the information label let alone tune in to the painting’s mysterious mood.
The first show will be dedicated to van Gogh. Visitors will be engulfed in mesmerizing close-ups of the Dutch master’s brushstrokes as 3,000 ultra-high-resolution moving images of his lushest paintings flood the floors, ceilings and walls. The effect is for visitors to feel like they are physically immersed in three-dimensional paintings. The experience will be multi-sensory, explains the director, Charles Venable, who is also CEO of the multi-disciplinary Newfields art site, home to the IMA.
“This will be an entirely new experience for most Americans,” he told Robb Report. “As well as 30-foot tall images where you can see van Gogh’s individual brushstrokes, we are commissioning a music score, and considering aroma experimentation, so when you walk through a wheat-field painting you can smell the South of France. We’re not just talking about putting someone’s work up on a monitor.” One hundered fifty high-definition projectors will beam the images into the space, part of a major investment by Lilly Endowment, the philanthropic foundation created in 1937 by the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical business.
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Experiential digital art shows have taken off as popular attractions overseas, notably in Tokyo, where an immersive museum by digital art collective teamLab became the world’s most visited single-artist museum last year, its 2.3 million visitor total exceeding that of the Picasso Museum in Barcelona or Amsterdam’s van Gogh Museum. TeamLab’s work typically involves interactive technicolor displays of kinetic digital images, using LEDs, lasers and projections of original work mixed with details from traditional Japanese paintings. The trippy effect is part nightclub, part conceptual art installation, part children’s party. Read more from Robb Report
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