Making museums accessible through VR, cultural institutions in Australia, groundbreaking experience design, virtual exhibition walkthroughs, and art in VR
Kai
Kai is the founder and CEO of Curated x Kai, an award-winning virtual reality company which films inclusive VR field trips in museums and other cultural institutions. Through outreach, CxK delivers those experiences to students and young adults, including those in underserved communities. You can browse through all the field trips available and order VR headsets for the classroom. For more info on what Kai is up to, follow her on Twitter.
Seb Chan
Seb Chan is Chief Experience Officer at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne. His Fire, Fire, Fire talk on cultural institutions, technology and the internet is a fantastic read.
…we need to think deeply about whether art is used as a social glue, to bring our communities together, or whether it acts, as it sometimes still does, as a social solvent, dividing our communities by social and cultural status.
We will need to support new types of experiences, in new types of institutions; work with new processes and find new ways to collaborate, and build new social structures, new infrastructure, and support new ecosystems.
Local Projects
Led by Jake Barton, Local Projects has been involved in designing museum spaces and experiences for many years and was a pioneer in the field of interaction design. Barton talks about working at the “mish-mash of space and storytelling.” In 2003 Local Projects helped develop StoryCorps and have worked with museums like Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, The Legacy Museum, National September 11 Memorial and Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, as well as hospitals, schools and other spaces. To hear more about these projects listen to Barton’s talk from 2014 at Design Indaba.
Most technology is made for one person or for you to extract information from the interface. We build interfaces that are social — they are meant to have a secondary experience. This is a very important distinction that comes out of the physical space itself.
V21 Artspace
VR21 Artspace create 3D virtual walkthroughs of exhibitions using laser scanning technology. These virtual tours are available on all online platforms and as immersive virtual reality experiences. They recently captured Sheffield Doc/Fest’s Alternate Realities exhibition, Subconscious Sensibilities. This is an interesting way of archiving temporary exhibitions and providing some level of access for those who were not able to attend in person.
Acute Art
Acute Art brings together renowned international artists, new media and technology to produce and exhibit visual artworks in VR, AR and mixed-reality. Works produced include those by Marina Abramović, Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Olafur Eliasson, Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, Bjarne Melgaard, Jeff Koons and more. The artworks are accessible through their website, the Acute Art app and creative collaborations with recent exhibitions taking place in Basel, London, Moscow, New York and Venice.
This piece is part of an issue of Immerse sponsored by the Knight Foundation in conjunction with Knight’s call for ideas to advance immersive arts experiences. Open for applications through August 12, the call offers recipients a share of $750,000 in funding, as well as optional technical support from Microsoft. Learn more.
Immerse is an initiative of the MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund, and it receives funding from Just Films | Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. IFP is our fiscal sponsor. Learn more here. We are committed to exploring and showcasing media projects that push the boundaries of media and tackle issues of social justice — and rely on friends like you to sustain ourselves and grow. Join us by making a gift today.