Interactive AR windows inspired by the art of surrealist René Magritte
IMAGE: FROG
Long before face filters and dancing hot dogs could alter the way we see the world and ourselves, there was already a group of people experimenting with the notion of the “real”: surrealist artists.
In recent years, a number of museums, artists, and institutions have created experiences that combine art with digital supplements, augmented reality, or virtual reality. One such project comes from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), as part of its late career retrospective of surrealist René Magritte: The Fifth Season.
SFMOMA commissioned the creative agency frog design for the project, asking them for an interactive technology integration that would build upon, not simply mirror, the artist’s work.
Frog came back with the “Magritte Interpretive Gallery”: The final room of the exhibit, it’s an augmented reality gallery that allows visitors to interact with digital interpretations of some of the Magritte work featured, such as the iconic High Society. Stand-alone windows contain depth- and motion-sensing cameras, and screens in place of window panes integrate the images of viewers into Magritte landscapes in ways that don’t conform to ordinary rules like perspective, distance, and time. Unlike many other AR and VR integrations, there’s no smartphone or VR headset required. The windows are the screens through which visitors can glimpse the altered worlds.
It’s perhaps one of the museum x AR trend’s best, and most intoxicating, executions.
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Two windows in the immersive gallery, inspired by ‘The Happy Donor’ and ‘Le Blanc Seing’
IMAGE: FROG
Few artists directly interrogated expectations about reality and art more than the 20th-century artist René Magritte. Magritte is famous for a hyper-realistic style of painting that he applies to esoteric concepts like the difference between an object and the representation of an object (The Treachery of Images), obfuscation and desire (The Son of Man), or our rigid and easily disturbed perception of reality (The Dominion of Light). “I suppose you can call me a surrealist. But one should really say I am concerned with realism … the real with the mystery that is in the real,” Magritte said.
SFMOMA and frog wanted to combine AR tools with Magritte’s philosophy and his art to build upon these themes and go beyond just producing digital iterations of the original work.
“We didn’t want to do a one-for-one replication,” Charles Yust, frog’s principal design technologist, told Mashable. “They’re all interpretations, and the paintings were a jumping-off point.”
As a result, the gallery incorporates the visuals from many of the paintings with an interactive space that furthers Magritte’s themes by letting museum goers inhabit an altered reality.
“Once you get through all of the chapters of his late career, finally you land in the interpretive gallery,” Oonie Chase, frog’s executive creative director, said. “There, you get to play with these ideas of identity, perception, paradoxes, and visual puns that he is so well known for.”
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Looking through a window into the woods of Le Blanc Seing (rough translation: “Free Rein”), you see your reflection chopped up among the trees as if you’re both walking through the woods, and a part of the trees themselves. Peering into the clouds of High Society makes your reflection appear in a far-off window; in another window, looking into a blue sky, only your features appear, recalling Magritte’s Sheherazade. The gallery aims to surprise and prompt visitors to think about why we gaze into a mirror when we always expect to see the same thing. By inverting reality, it shows us how the laws of nature that we so take for granted are themselves extraordinary.
“We wanted people to walk out with a little bit of an uncertainty about the world they’re walking into,” Chase said. “To explore the idea of what is real, and the question of what you give up when you just accept reality as it is.”
To inspire that surprise and curiosity, making the technology non-intrusive was key. Yust’s team had to engineer the room very specifically so the cameras captured just the people standing in front of it, and no more. They specifically decided against using any external technology that visitors themselves would have to handle, like headsets or smartphone apps. And they aimed to make the technology function as seamlessly as possible.
“The overarching theme and way that we were guided was just to make this technology as invisible as possible,” Yust said.
SFMOMA and frog has provided Mashable with a video to show how frog used advanced depth-sensing cameras and motion-tracking technology to create the immersive but technologically seamless environment.
One recent visitor of the exhibit described the Interpretive Gallery to me as the “cherry on top” of the exhibit. It inserted energy and vivacity, adding an element of delight to the experience. SFMOMA is finding through visitor surveys that the experience is deepening people’s relationship with the art, too.
“These kinds of wordless, playful experiences can have tremendous impact,” Chad Coerver, SFMOMA’s chief content officer, said. “It somehow serves to cement the experiences and bring them closer to the artwork in ways that words can’t.”
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Source: Mashable