Tate Modigliani VR Experience and Mat Collishaw's Thresholds

There are a couple of high profile VR installations within art galleries that appear to follow a similar format and are relevant for this project for two different reasons addressed later. These are recreations of either artists studios, as exemplified by the Modigliani VR experience at the Tate modern, or in the case of artist Mat Collishaw’s installation, Threshold, a recreation of an exhibition of photography by Fox Talbot in 1839.

The Modigliani experience is based in a recreation of his studio as it looked in 1919, at the time he painted his last self portrait. It is a guided experience into the artist’s world and tries to give the audience a sense of his studio, objects and working environment. The viewer has to sit and they are able to look around the space as they are guided through it. They are not in control of the experience.

Collishaw’s experience, on the other hand, allows the viewer to walk around a prepared space and interact with Fox Talbot’s gallery at their will. The installation is based in a room that is identical in footprint to the VR space and the cabinets in the vr gallery are represented in real life by similar shaped, but very blank boxes. It means that when the viewer reaches out to touch the cabinet in the VR simulation they can actually feel it (or at least its blank version in the real world). This certainly adds to the immersiveness/realness of the experience.

https://matcollishaw.com/exhibitions/thresholds/
https://frieze.com/article/its-kind-magic

One of the things that this (blogs) VR Gallery Project aims to address is the lack of space in art studios and lack of real exhibition experience that students encounter. We want the students to interact with the work like in Collishaw’s Threshold but in the restricted space of the Modigliani experience. It must be immersive and step beyond the ‘novel experience’ as exemplified by Modigliani but achieved in a much smaller space than Collishaw. Above all is should be a useful and accessible tool for artists. Usability is something we will look at later in the project.