hate to sound like an unimaginative Tinder profile but I do enjoy going to art galleries. Switching off my phone, putting away my camera and strolling around in silence, staring at pieces of work that have existed for two years or two hundred years.
You can appreciate the skill that is required to produce something beautiful, but what’s more interesting is often the vision that compelled a painter or sculptor to pick up a brush, pencil or rasp and create something new. And there is only so much a caption beside a painting, or a curator’s audio guide, can convey of the story behind those works. Virtual reality is offering a new way to tell that story and it could be the next big step to bringing the artists and their fans much closer together.
The From Life exhibition, which runs from December 2017 to March 2018, takes place across the Sackler Wing of Galleries and Tennant Gallery in the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Taking the short lift ride up to the second floor of the RA building and walking through to the first of those two spaces, curator Adrian Locke is already in full flow bringing some context to a collection that explores creative encounters of the human body.
In the first space I see 18th century artworks before entering a room filled with life drawings. Iggy Pop is the high profile life model and all of these drawings were taken from Jeremy Deller’s Iggy Pop Life Class, which took place in the Brooklyn Museum in 2016. The From Life exhibition is a step through time and is concerned with how artists’ interpretations of the body have evolved thanks to the tools and the technology that have been available to create those interpretations.
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Credit: Jonathan Yeo’s “Homage to Paolozzi” (Self Portrait) (2017)
So where does virtual reality come in? A good place to begin is British portrait painter Jonathan Yeo’s”Homage to Paolozzi” (Self Portrait). This isa bronze sculpture of his own head and it was created using advanced 3D scanning technology and Google’s Tilt Brush software on the Vive. Headset on and within the app, Yeo was able to capture the brush strokes and translate them into the physical object.
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Source: Wareable