Van Gogh Exhibit in London: The Immersive Experience is another contribution to the rather tasteless trend where old painters go immersive. It seems to be a commercially viable concept to present the fake if you can’t get the real thing. The concept is designed for mass production so it is currently possible to see replicas of this setup in at least 10 cities around the world. However the installations are worth seeing from a technical perspective if you are really craving for an AV-experience but not for the art.
The exhibition is divided into several galleries where the first is a purely analogue “exhibition“ with printed posters and paintings that look like something you can buy at IKEA. Not a promising welcome to the world of VVG. Other galleries are small setups with simple projections where one of them uses a statue of VVG as a screen where paintings are animated and awfully projected at his face.
There is one immersive room with 10 projectors nicely concealed above screens and in the ceiling where “stars” are scattered. The layout is a standard 4+1 screen (walls and floor). Animations are graphic interpolations between stills, fragments of painted objects and effect layers. The music track accompanying the images has very synthetic strings and sounds very low budget.
The experience more than fulfils any prejudice you may have around digitalisation of old painters so after this you can easily skip the next ones announced which includes other artists like Monet etc. which will help the business to continue – probably as adding new content to the same platform.
Pros
Nice true 360 degree animations in the immersive experience
Cons
Poor lineup in projection overlap zones
Cheap overall impression
