Is it a gimmick for the Instagram generation or a transformative approach to digital art?
The interior room at G5A Mumbai is pitch black, but for a chilling white ring that whirs and swells on a screen in front of us. As the cold, glassy electronic music reaches a crescendo, the ring bleeds onto screens set perpendicular to its left and right, exploding into a maze of silvery slow-moving rivulets, like a big bang of mercury snaking around us.
For the next 12 minutes of visual artist Aniruddh Mehta and ‘creative technologist’ Aaron Myles Pereira’s Overture, red-lined grids close in and out around this small, 15-member audience. Blocks of candy-coloured shards twirl in slow motion, glittering rocks in pirouette. Streams of white particles float through the air, a dust-storm in slow motion.
We zoom over a monochrome rendition of a broken house swivelling in and out of relief. We are stunned by blocks of colour—blinding white, shocking red, solid black—clapping at us. It ends as it begins, back to being a black box, with passages from Richard Brautigan’s poem All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, appearing in white on all three screens around us.
/established/media/post_attachments/theestablished/2023-01/7299ea2a-4f30-49a7-b078-1ffaf6debf3d/_S228099_copy.jpg)
Visual artist Aniruddh Mehta and ‘creative technologist’ Aaron Myles Pereira’s Overture
/established/media/post_attachments/theestablished/2023-01/d611181d-f129-4734-8fd1-bbf7273ad948/Once_Upon_A_Time___Pic___5.jpg)
Vishwesh Menon, the animator worked with Padma Shri awardee Durga Bai Vyam to bring Once Upon A Time
“Overture was about inspiring awe,” say Mehta and Pereira, who created it as part of Immerse, the third satellite event held in December 2022, in the run-up to the Mumbai Light Festival. “Some people said they were really emotional when the photogrammetry of the house showed up. Others exchanged opposing views on the concept of humans and machines living in harmony given the rise of AI technologies. Someone also described the experience as ‘being inside a video game that was crashing and restarting at the same time’. That was kinda cool.”
Novel ways of engaging with technology
Awe is a key feature of immersive public art, of which Overture is a unique, early example in India. “Immersive art is a shorthand to imply art-based experiences that heavily rely on technology, ranging from LEDs, projections, AR, VR as well as complex sound systems,” says Shakti Sahu, co-founder, Floating Canvas Company, the organisation behind Immerse and the Mumbai Light Festival. “The canvas is such that viewers get a sense of being inside the work of art. It can be the walls of a room, studio or auditorium. Sometimes it can include the floor and the ceiling too.”
Instagram is witness to immersive art’s sudden wild popularity around the globe: Holidays in Tokyo, London, New York, Miami are no longer complete without selfies in mirrored rooms showered with light, or warehouses bathed top-to-bottom in Van Gogh’s Starry Night. It has been said that immersive art’s popularity—featuring Van Gogh’s Impressionist landscapes, in particular—is due to Emily Cooper’s casual preference for the Atelier des Lumieres over the Louvre in the Netflix mega-hit series Emily in Paris.
/established/media/post_attachments/theestablished/2023-01/f7fe2cfb-d68c-421d-b714-b531feee9f86/https___tf_cmsv2_smithsonianmag_media.webp)
Van Gogh's Starry Night
But it likely has more to do with its existence on the axis of technology, social media and the emerging experience economy. “Immersive art is a whole new way to experience and engage with technology for those spending time closed off in their offices or interacting with technology through the medium of a screen,” say Mehta and Pereira. “It’s novel, it’s accessible, and it can make someone stop and stare, which is a big factor in today’s media landscape,” says Sahu.
Going back in time
Conceptual immersive art itself is not new. Japanese art doyen Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Light Rooms have been around since the 1960s. Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson had set up The Weather Project in London in 2003. Random International’s Rain Room caused a mini stampede at the Barbican in London in 2012.
“I haven’t been to the iconic ones; my only immersive experience would be a show at Disneyland Hong Kong, called ‘Mickey’s Philharmagic’,” laughs Vishwesh Menon, the animator who worked with Padma Shri awardee Durga Bai Vyam to bring her picturesque Gond artwork for the other half of Immerse.
Menon and Vyam’s Once Upon A Time…, supported by the Ministry of Culture, is a visually stunning 15-minute show that takes you on a road trip into a village in the heart of India, where florid flora and almond-eyed fauna join the human residents in a carnival for dance and music. “When you look at Durga Bai’s work as a composition or static frame, you may miss out on so much in there. The detail is the hero in these paintings. With this experience I wanted to showcase those elements of her art that might get missed,” explains Menon.
“TeamLAB’s Borderless installations to Super Blue Miami, technology-fuelled immersive art has also been around for at least 6-7 years,” says Aparajita Jain, co-director of Nature Morte and founder of Terrain.Art. And yet, it’s been very slow to pick up in India because, says Jain, “these shows are pretty expensive to put up; and we haven’t really had the infrastructure for hosting them either. But as technology becomes more accessible, the possibilities are immense.”
Navigating challenges
That technology is key to creating this art: Mehta, Pereira and Menon cite applications and software like 3D Blender, AfterEffects, Cinema4D, Jitter (a subset of a programming language called Max) for the artwork, and Ableton Live for the music. But since immersive art fundamentally requires the creation of an environment for a visitor to step into, there’s also pricey hardware to deploy.
“At the moment, we are making use of the limited inventory that exists for corporate events and expos, when we can and when the budget permits,” says Sahu. “This is all rented,” adds Floating Canvas Co’s co-founder Aagam M, “and combined with the fees of technicians—because this technology requires expertise, and involves overheads—these can be prohibitively expensive to mount.”
It’s why, unlike art exhibits in private galleries, an immersive art experience is a ticketed event; much like museums. Entry for each 15-minute show at Immerse was priced at ₹ 499. “Our hope is that eventually public institutions, foundations and even individual patrons will find enough value in this form of presenting art to support it,” says Sahu. “As the space evolves, many more revenue streams might open up,” adds Menon. “Shows could have merchandise being sold, maybe you could buy parts of the video through digital NFT sales. But for now, ticket sales is the most robust profit model.”
“FROM DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION, ANIMATION, CODING AND VIDEO INSTALLATION TO MIXED MEDIA, IT’S BEEN THRILLING TO SEE A NEW GENERATION OF ARTISTS WHO’RE USING THE POWER OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY TO BREAK BOUNDARIES OF ARTISTIC EXPRESSION AND STORYTELLING”
Jaya Asokan
A solo matinee weekday show of the upcoming Van Gogh 360° experience at Mumbai’s World Trade Centre would cost ₹ 999; a weekend viewing going up to ₹ 1,399. “We had heard about several Van Gogh exhibits that were touring,” says Festival House, the Canadian company behind this experience, which has had successful outings in Ottawa. “After seeing one of them, we reached out to a very talented animator at Aquaviva Productions. Over more than an eight-month period, Van Gogh 360º was developed.”
The Festival House team admits that Van Gogh 360° is similar to the half-a-dozen other Van Gogh immersive experiences currently doing the rounds on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, but add that the sequencing is different, the animator’s creative interpretation is unique, and there is an original soundtrack.
Along with being particularly attuned to an immersive environment due to the depth and detail in his paintings, these shows are popular, quite simply because as spokesperson Nikhil Chinapa puts it, “Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings are some of the most recognisable in the world and everyone deserves to get up close and personal with his work, outside of museums, especially for young adults and children.”
“Van Gogh’s Starry Nights would be an amazing example of immersive art projects being a way to enhance the experience of folk or modern or renaissance or contemporary art,” posits Prateek Raja, founder of the Kolkata-origin Experimenter Gallery, “because there’s a vast expanse of a space in the painting itself, conceptually speaking. But if you did that with the Mona Lisa, I’m not sure you’d want her eyes floating all around you. I think it mostly works with art that is defining space, that allows one to enter that landscape itself.”
/established/media/post_attachments/theestablished/2023-01/45e7795c-a49f-44fe-9ff6-8e0b287cac72/Soumya_Sankar_Bose__A_Discreet_Exit_Through_Darkness_4_copy.jpg)
Soumya Sankar Bose, A Discreet Exit through Darkness
/established/media/post_attachments/theestablished/2023-01/0a025783-7c93-4b7f-b986-699f2948e73e/313212939_801177830990264_1528520477074584017_n.jpg)
A show by Atelier des Lumières
A multi-sensory exploration
“The three-dimensional world that we are all going to experience in a few years is already here. It makes sense to create these multi-sensory explorations of space. I don’t think the contemporary art world is close to this yet,” he adds. Operating in the somewhat more niche space of contemporary fine arts, Raja also feels this might not be their space, but there are other explorations of immersion going on at Experimenter.
One of these is photographer Soumya Shankar Bose’s new show, A Discreet Exit Through Darkness, currently on display at Experimenter Mumbai. “The show has a VR feature-length film that is not animated. Typically, Bose’s projects, built over long periods of time, are filmed narratives about communities or stories that are untold. But this time he experimented with VR to tell a personal story.”
The VR film is about Bose’s mother, who disappeared for a bit when she was nine years old. She was found about three years later, mostly on the behest of her father; but she had no memory or recollection of this period, due to a neurological disorder. Bose speaks with people in the family about their memories, recreating scenes to narrate this story of his grandfather and mother, but this is a film with no resolution. “You have to put on an Oculus to watch this, and you’ll feel as if there’s always something behind you or slightly out of your field of vision,” says Raja.
/established/media/post_attachments/theestablished/2023-01/fc8a0d3c-aadf-4f43-ab0b-b0e9bb15f59d/275913265_1658028404545304_4370465331987358295_n.jpg)
teamLAB's Borderless
/established/media/post_attachments/theestablished/2023-01/b6446fb3-bf0b-48a1-96ac-a716aab15ac7/321308179_1579827805794295_7067613875716608544_n.jpg)
teamLAB's Superblue Miami
An evolving landscape
Virtual reality or wearables as tools of artistic immersion were widely experimented with before and during the pandemic, but their potential hasn’t been fully realised, often leading to gimmicky results, according to Rahul Yadav, the third co-founder of Floating Canvas Co. “It’s easier to have wearables-based art when working with a limited audience or smaller rooms,” he says. “Plus, the amount of people that can enjoy an art piece in an immersive experience, and that communal experience itself, cannot be replicated in VR.”
At this very nascent stage, the immersive art landscape is evolving, and rapidly so. As we wait for technology to catch up, there seems to be a broader interpretation of immersive art emerging in India: Something that occasionally melds new media with old, but that necessarily creates a sensorial experience for spectacular results, unrestricted by the field of vision or materials used.
Sahu remembers Chilean poet Raul Zurita’s Sea of Pain at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2017, which basically involved walking through a room filled with water to read the poetry written on walls. Yadav mentions Amygdala Anomalies, FCC’s first ‘event’ working with contemporary artist Sajid Wajid Shaikh, where they played with senses of smell, touch, sight and sound.
Raja talks about Bombay Tilts Down, Mumbai-based award-winning Studio CAMP’s “seven-channel environment” at the ongoing Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which was shot with one powerful surveillance camera installed on top of a high-rise building in Mumbai, and comments on the nature of development by toying with time stamps. Jain mentions Asim Waqif’s Improvise, a 20-feet- high installation at Aspinwall House, made of bamboo, coir, pandanus leaves and ‘panambu’, holding musical instruments, a cradle and light-emitting objects—a work commenting on the importance of things that have been discarded.
Immersive art is also a focus at the Digital Residency Hub at the 14th India Art Fair, to take place in February in New Delhi. On show will be “cutting-edge immersive projects by our first-ever Digital Artists in Residence Mira Felicia Malhotra, Gaurav Ogale and Varun Desai in a dedicated art-meets-tech Studio space at India Art Fair 2023,” says festival director Jaya Asokan. “From digital illustration, animation, coding and video installation to mixed media, it’s been thrilling to see a new generation of artists who’re using the power of digital technology to break boundaries of artistic expression and storytelling.”
It isn’t even just about a form arriving in time for a new generation of artists that start with digital pens and not paint brushes. Veterans of the industry are also exploring the format. Without going into details, Jain teases an immersive art project by the renowned contemporary artist Jitish Kallat, called Eons.
Chinapa, whose defining memory of an immersive experience are the Awakenings techno parties held inside the Gashouder (an abandoned gas storage facility built in the early 1990s) in Amsterdam, also foresees much exciting activity at the intersection of immersive art and live music. “Projection-mapping is a part of performances not just at music festivals, but also in clubs. Tech-savvy artists are building new kinds of creative experiences that bring together filmmaking, live theatre, sculpture and AR. The opportunities are limitless.”
Immersive art right now is what Menon calls a “blank canvas.” “Immersive experiences don’t have a grammar attached to them,” he says. “If you want an interactive experience, you can have cameras tracking people, and that data in realtime changing the visuals on the screen, floor or walls. As a medium, immersive art is beneficial to any kind of subject. It could be that seeing folk art in a contemporary form might kindle interest where there was none. Things that need awareness, that haven’t got their due, are great candidates for an immersive experience. Because, in the end, the nature of [thoughts or feelings] that you’re left with after an immersive experience is what’s valuable.
Also Read: Is art conservation and restoration in India finally getting the attention it deserves?
Also Read: Have global climate change protests in public art spaces done more damage than good?
Also Read: How soon in their career should an artist’s retrospective be held?