Haser lma it: A
Portra
APOLLO JANUARY 2018
EDITOR’S LETTER
The new realism
They have started to send Rembrandts into space. I saw one recently in the Kremer Museum – a vast, weightless building with a dome like the Pantheon, in which the constellations are visible beneath your feet as you cross the suspended walkways that connect the colonnaded gallery at its perimeter. I stepped closer to Bust of an Old Man with Turban (1627–28) than I have to any other work by Rembrandt in a museum, scrutinising the texture of its surface and then shuffling around the panel to inspect its reverse. The gallery was empty, or so I thought: as I moved on to another Golden Age painting, the collector George Kremer appeared, eager to talk me through its significance.
The Kremer Museum has been constructed in space, I suppose, because as a digital museum it is a building that is both anywhere and nowhere. To reach it, you strap on a virtual reality (VR) headset; to navigate it, you point and click with a hand-held device. Its holdings are visual models of more than 70 actual works from the Kremer Collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings, each of which has been photographed several thousand times for the creation of these high-resolution, three-dimensional composites. As projections in a VR environment, they replicate surface textures – and the sense of painting as objects – in a way that individual photographs do not make possible.
VR technology has been around for some time, but on the whole its clunky visuals and cumbersome headgear have limited its use beyond the more obsessive fringes of the computer-gaming world. Now that major technology companies have taken up the cause, however, refining the equipment and developing it for a mass market, VR is swiftly becoming a far more visible feature in our lives. This year, the Kremer Museum will become available as a mobile app, meaning that anyone with a smartphone and a cheap Google Daydream VR mask will be able to stroll through the collection from the comfort of their own living room.
The Kremers will also provide VR tools to schools in India (and elsewhere), offering a remote proximity to Old Master paintings in places where they are not otherwise available. The opportunities that VR entails for education and access are bound to be of growing interest to museums in coming years; the British Museum, for one, is currently working with the technology company Oculus to develop a VR tour of its galleries. Elsewhere, museums are deploying VR experiences in an effort to transport their visitors elsewhere: ‘Modigliani’ at Tate Modern (until 2 April) includes a recreation of the artist’s final studio in Paris, entered by donning a VR headset.
As with so many radical technologies, however, it is through artists rather than institutions that the most unexpected purposes of this brave new world are likely to be determined and dissected. Last year, the New Museum in New York launched ‘First Look: Artists’ VR’, an exhibition of six virtual reality works (accessible remotely through a mobile app), which enveloped its visitors in fantastical alternative realms, among them a simulation of the afterlife by Jeremy Couillard. And in recent years, artists such as Jon Rafman and Jordan Wolfson have created VR works that deliver the thrill of a slickly produced immersive experience even while they examine what these other worlds imply about materiality, agency, and our sense of self.
Aware that it is still at an exploratory stage, tech companies are using artists not only to market but also to develop VR tools. Such is the case with the painter Jonathan Yeo, who has been experimenting for 18 months with ‘Tilt Brush’, a programme from Google that allows its users to draw and paint in virtual reality. With the virtual environment allowing him to work in three dimensions, Yeo realised that he could in effect paint a sculptural form for the first time – and that, by importing a digital scan of his own head into the programme, he could study himself in the round and create a new type of self-portrait. The software was then adapted so that the digital image could be cast as a bronze sculpture, which is currently on display in ‘From Life’ at the Royal Academy (until 11 March). Has sci-fi become the new realism? o Thomas Marks, Editor
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