VIRTUAL CURATING FREES ARTIST

Curating an art exhibition is an exacting job. In the physical realm, it's also labor intensive, so decisions on placement carry considerable overhead. Photographers typically aren't involved in the planning of an exhibition. We basically record what is, not what's yet to come. But is there a practical way to use photography of the artwork to rapidly create a virtual gallery and curate an immersive exhibition very close to the physical reality?

Enter the virtual environment

When Rafael Perea de La Cabada came to me for archival quality photography of his art in advance of an upcoming exhibition, our conversation also turned to the challenges for him to curate the show. He wanted to explore various ideas but was feeling captive to the physicality of moving artwork from his studio to the distant exhibition location. I proposed a virtual environment application that allows very rapid creation of places that one can walk through, virtually, or export to 360º panoramas for immersive viewing. The application is OpenSimulator, often referred to as OpenSim.

For instance, rather than building shapes from scratch, a number of primitives, called prims, are available in common useful shapes, such as a box. A box can be stretched and resized to make a floor, wall, picture frame or a 'canvas' on which to apply the photographic image of an artwork. Lights are also available to simulate general illumination. Build times vary with the size of an exhibition, but a virtual gallery can be created in a handful hours, and curating the show can begin immediately as artwork images are uploaded.

Photography from day one

When Perea approached me, the need was clear: photograph his artwork with archival protocols. This meant high-resolution captures, flat, even lighting with suppression of ambient light contamination, and the inclusion of captures that included a color chart for setting white balance in post-production.

Done this way, these are also excellent images for making an effective virtual gallery for curating a show in advance of an on-site real-world installation.

To make virtual curating work, every artwork photo needs to be documented with exact real-world measurements. This is because the virtual gallery will be built to scale. I like to put those dimensions into the filename, which keeps them intrinsically associated with each artwork. The artwork sizes were provided to me with the dimensions as inches. JPEG files are ideal for virtual gallery work.

Building the gallery

To build any gallery, it's first necessary to acquire some reference material. For the Perea project, I knew the gallery would be the Ann Foxworthy Gallery at Allan Hancock College. Google searching produced a number of images, and the gallery director also supplied digital images and overall dimensions.

There's a learning curve to working in a virtual 3D environment. Yet of all the 3D tools I've used, including Maya, Modo, SketchUp, ZBrush and 3D Studio, OpenSim is by far (by far!) the fastest and most user friendly. The trade-off is ultimate visual quality. High-end applications like Maya are used for cinema quality CGI. OpenSim is not, by itself, capable of that level of visual realism. But our purpose was to curate an art exhibition virtually, which only we and a handful of other people would see, and for that kind of project, OpenSim fills the bill, as you can see below in sample images (OpenSim top, Ann Foxworthy Gallery photography bottom)...

Curating

For the Perea exhibition, he had a preliminary set of ideas as to how the art would be arranged. Once the virtual gallery was assembled, and the photos of his artwork were uploaded and attached to prims sized according to the dimensions of each piece, I moved each artwork into the initially proposed locations on the walls. This process was so fast, we could often sit on the phone while I made the changes and forwarded screenshots via email.

Perea commented more than once that this process was a great relief. Because the environment was 3D, the camera viewpoint could be placed anywhere. The art was imported at 2K quality while the export of 360º panoramic views were at 8K, making it possible to create a quality virtual tour. Nine key positions were effective in providing a walk-through experience. The 360º panoramic views were also valuable for sharing and collaborating with other stakeholders, such as the gallery director.

Final Thoughts

Curating an art exhibition takes careful planning. Much of that process is conceptual, but the actual installation of art requires considerable physical work.

Using a 3D environment that facilitates very rapid construction and a "realistic enough" display presents the opportunity for a gallery director, curator, or the artist, to previsualize an exhibition immersively, at scale. This then makes possible the highly effective exploration of options, before relatively permanent installation decisions are implemented.