Marina Abramović via Acute Art Photo: NETDNA-CDN.COM
From VR to AR: Art and Digital Technology
By Philip Auslander
Photo of Atlanta Beltline VR Experience by Eclipso
Immersion, a buzz word in the realm of virtual entertainment, has been the holy grail of cinematic technologies for more than half a century. Cinerama, a film display system involving three synchronized projectors and a screen wide enough to encompass the viewer’s field of vision, was introduced in 1952. This is Cinerama, a film made to present the system, contains a rollercoaster sequence that is a continuous point of view shot taken from the frontmost seat on the coaster. It provides a surprisingly effective virtual experience of the ride. Although Cinerama films were shown in conventional movie theaters, its successor, IMAX, whose origins lie in systems developed for Expo 67, the Montreal World’s Fair, requires a purpose-built theater with a very large screen, stadium seating, and a projection system that runs the film horizontally to create the widest possible image. Subsequent attempts at achieving immersion have eschewed projection in favor of virtual reality (VR) systems which rely on headsets that cover the participant’s eyes and ears so that they receive sensory information only from the virtual world. Whereas the immersive effect of cinematic systems is primarily a function of scale and the illusion of depth across a frontal, two-dimensional field, VR systems allow the participant to experience a seamless, 360-degree virtual world when looking in any direction, including up, down, and behind.
Several immersive VR entertainments take art or art history as their subject matter. Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience includes a headset-based walk from van Gogh’s bedroom through the town of Arles that seems as if one is walking through the artist’s paintings. Tonight with the Impressionists recreates the evening in 1874 Paris when an exhibition organized by artists who had been rejected from the Paris Salon inaugurated Impressionism. These productions notwithstanding, and despite the inroads immersive VR has made into entertainments of this kind and, of course, gaming, where immersive VR games account for about a third of the North American market, it has not been taken up extensively by contemporary artists. There was a moment prior to the global COVID-19 pandemic when some declared that immersive VR would be the next big thing in the art world. Partially because of the pandemic, however, the development of this technology in the art context moved in a different direction, resulting in the current trend toward augmented reality (AR) in art.
Anish Kapoor, I Into Yourself–Fall Produced in collaboration with Acute Art, 2018, Virtual reality still
Around 2017, it appeared as if immersive VR could be a viable art medium. In that year, Acute Art, one of several production companies operating at the intersection of art and VR, worked with blue-chip artists Jeff Koons, Marina Abramović, and Olafur Eliasson on early VR works, followed by Anish Kapoor in 2018. The works took on a variety of forms. In Koons’s piece, Phryne, an animated version of his monumental metallic Seated Ballerina sculpture (2017), takes the participant on a tour of a lush garden. Rejecting the idea of translating an existing work into virtual terms, Kapoor chose with Into Yourself (2018) to construct a voyage through the interior of the human body, imagined as a dark ride through cavernous viscera in black and red. Abramović constructed a video game. As a performance artist known for putting her own body on the line in her work, Abramović was intrigued by the possibility of building an avatar that resembles her but extends her physical capabilities. Abramović’s game, Rising, is meant to address ecological cataclysm due to climate change. Abramović’s avatar appears in a tank of water that is slowly filling up. The gamer has the choice of saving Abramović and a city that is being overwhelmed by floods, or to let both and, by extension, humanity, die. Eliasson’s Rainbow is a virtual version of the installation Rainbow Assembly (2016) in which light reflected and refracted through falling water can create a natural rainbow by unnatural means.
Olafur Eliasson, Rainbow assembly, 2016, Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing 2018, Photo: Anders Sune Berg
Despite a high-profile introduction of these works at Art Basel in Hong Kong in 2018, the predicted immersive VR art revolution never happened, for many possible reasons. One is simply that the need for a headset to create the sensation of immersion means that the VR experience is essentially solitary. Whereas standing in front of a painting or sculpture in a gallery can be a shared experience, even an occasion for sociality, immersive VR is addressed to an individual’s perceptual faculties. There are also many factors related to the physical needs of VR exhibition, which requires a large empty space if many people are to engage in it simultaneously as well as a great deal of computing power, infrastructure, and maintenance that most museums and galleries are probably not able to provide. Additionally, there was a great deal of skepticism concerning how saleable VR works would prove to be. The technologies on which they depend are still developing rapidly, making obsolescence an issue. Whereas video art works are generally sold as limited editions like prints (this is how Abramović’s mixed reality work The Life, consisting of a digital file and the hardware to activate it, was auctioned in 2019), it was unclear whether this model could be extended to VR works or whether they would be marketed more in the way video games and films are.
Before these issues could be explored further, this initial flurry of VR activity in the art world was curtailed by the COVID-19 pandemic that began at the start of 2020. The question of how immersive VR could work in museum and gallery spaces was rendered moot by the reluctance of viewers to enter such spaces, and their closure, whether temporary or permanent. (One imagines that even those who braved the pandemic to see art in person might balk at the prospect of wearing a VR headset someone else had just used in those days of social distancing.) The development of VR technology in the art world was rerouted away from the production of virtual artworks and toward the development of virtual exhibition spaces to substitute for the physical places in which art had been viewed and sold, including virtual versions of commercial galleries, museums, and art fairs.
Behind the scenes of Marina Abramović's new virtual reality artwork, "Rising, presented for the first time by HTC VIVE during Art Basel in Hong Kong (29 – 31 March 2018). The work has been produced in collaboration with Acute Art and marks the first time Abramović has realized an artwork using virtual reality technology.
This retooling of the technology proved fruitful for both art and commerce, as this approach to using VR paved the way to its most prevalent use in the art context today. Lisson Gallery worked with a software developer to produce a smart phone app that would allow prospective art buyers to see what works they might buy would look like in their homes. Although the gallery developed the app for its own use, they made it widely available. Using the phone camera, the app allows the user to superimpose a virtual image of the artwork on the real-time camera image of a place and even take a photo or video of what the work would look like there. This combination of virtual reality and real reality is called Augmented Reality (AR); the smart phone’s screen is the plane on which these two realities meet to form a third one. Acute Art and other production companies, such as 4th Wall, divorced this technology from its sales function and turned it into a means of exhibiting artworks made specifically for these platforms, initially during the pandemic as a way of keeping art accessible during lockdowns. Using the app, one can position a three-dimensional work of virtual art into any space, public or private, and see the result on the phone’s screen. Eliasson, who developed a suite of pieces collectively titled Wunderkammer for both Acute Art’s app and the exhibition The Looking Glass that took place outdoors in New York City in the summer of 2021, observed, “Today, where physical distancing guides our lives, it’s as crucial as ever that we surround ourselves with things and atmospheres that really matter to us.” AR blurs the lines between art in public and private spaces. This flexibility proved important during the pandemic. The Looking Glass was a revised version of Unreal City, an exhibition in London that had closed due to a lockdown and replaced with a version to be used at home. The Looking Glass took the form of an outdoor scavenger hunt as participants searched for QR codes that would reveal the virtual works through their smart phones.
Olafur Eliasson, Wunderkammer, 2020, The Highline, New York City, 2021, and London, 2021, Photos: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery and Acute Art
Whereas VR systems seek to create self-contained worlds sealed off from reality, AR is situated in the real world and replicates many of the characteristics of viewing physical art works. The fact that AR uses the smart phone as its platform makes it more accessible than VR systems that require specialized equipment. Because AR is not fully immersive, it does not isolate the participant and restores the potential for sociality to the experience of virtual art. Any number of people can view the work on their phones at the same time and interact with both the work and each other. The version of the technology that works with QR codes is site-specific—one can only see the virtual object at a specific location, much as one can only see a physical work of art where it is. Koons was a pioneer in this realm. At the same time as he worked with Acute Art to develop a VR work in 2017, he partnered with Snapchat to create a filter that allowed users to place virtual versions of his sculptures when they were at specific locations. You could see his giant chrome rabbit in front of the Eiffel Tower, for example. Nancy Baker Cahill’s CORPUS (2022/2024), a towering, animated figure on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles through March 2, 2025, also combines AR with geolocation—it can only be seen on the museum’s outdoor sculpture terrace through the 4th Wall phone app triggered by a QR code. Once accessed, the viewer can walk around the figure and see it in the round, much as one would experience a physically present monumental sculpture. Cahill showed Stone Speaks (2022), an AR project which traces the birth, life, and death of a planet that appears to be suspended in mid-air above its viewers through Flux Projects in Atlanta. The question of whether immersive VR will prove its worth as a fine art medium remains open; AR, which allows us to see virtual works in real space, clearly has.
Nancy Baker Cahill, Stone Speaks, 2023, Piedmont Park, Atlanta, Georgia, Flux Projects
Philip Auslander
photo: Marie Thomas
Philip Auslander writes frequently on performance, music, and art. His most recent books are In Concert: Performing Musical Persona, published in 2021, the third edition of Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, and Women Rock! Portraits in Popular Music, both 2023. Dr. Auslander is a Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication
at Georgia Tech, and the Editor of The Art Section.