Victoria Miro, the leading contemporary art gallery, has launched a new digital platform designed to offer the gallery’s exhibitions online at a cutting-edge technical and experiential level. Live / Archive uses a mix of 3D modelling, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), making the gallery the first, according to a launch statement, “to integrate these new technologies into all its activities, including an extensive archive of exhibitions”.
Live / Archive offers a mix of digital twins of the latest exhibitions from the gallery’s spaces in Islington, north London, and near Pizza San Marco, in Venice. The first tranche contains 72 archived shows which dates back nearly six years. The launch helps mark a significant anniversary for the gallery: Victoria Miro opened her first space in Cork Street, central London, 40 years ago, in 1985.
“Live / Archive represents a leap forward in how art is experienced in the digital age,” said Oliver Miro, partner at Victoria Miro, in the gallery’s launch statement. ‘We’re excited to be at the forefront of adopting new technologies that not only expand our reach but also significantly reduce carbon emissions associated with traditional art viewing.”
The launch archive dates back from this year’s shows to Grayson Perry: Super Rich Interior Decoration (5 September-20 December 2019), a display of the artist’s paintings and ceramic pots which closed on the eve of the Covid-19 global pandemic. Live / Archive is powered by Vortic, a platform for online exhibitions in 3D, AR and VR launched by Oliver Miro in March 2020—with serendipitous timing, just as the world’s commercial galleries looked for a new way to connect with buyers as the restrictions of social distancing, working from home and severely curtailed travel came into force around the globe.
A screen capture from Live / Archive, the new platform that hosts live and archived exhibitions from the Victoria Miro gallery Courtesy: Victoria Miro
The development of Vortic’s capacities since 2020— witnessed by the cinematic quality of Live / Archive’s user experience, the sophistication of its handling of light and shadow and the routes taken through a 3D exhibition, optimised with the latest artificial intelligence tools—is a testament to Oliver Miro’s long-term strategy for the platform. Vortic was built with its own custom software, optimised for the requirements of art exhibitions—rather than relying on the industry gaming engines such as Unity or Unreal—with the primary focus on the quality of object and image capture and display.
The Vortic team anticipated that the quality of viewer experience, through browser, mobile or VR headsets would develop (Vortic is in the app stores for the industry leading Meta and Apple headsets) without the gallery having to make new 3D models of pictures or sculptures to match the growing capabilities of commercially available hardware.
“We want it to feel like a really core part of the gallery,” Oliver Miro tells The Art Newspaper, speaking of Live / Archive. “We’re working with the artists, really closely, on not only the physical show but the digital twin of the show.” The new platform, he says, is being used an “advanced planning tool for the exhibitions. So pretty much every exhibition now we hang the show in the [virtual] space months before.”
“It’s so brilliant as an artist to be able to revisit paintings that are maybe scattered all over the world and you don’t get to see them again,” the Victoria Miro-represented artist Chantal Joffe said of Live / Archive in a launch statement. “I can pop back and walk around some of my old shows which is great. The tech is getting better and better all the time, so it’s exciting to see this new iteration. Also, I can try out ideas for hanging an exhibition, so that when we come to physically installing, much of the thinking and moving things around has been done virtually.”
A screen capture from Live / Archive, the new platform that hosts live and archived exhibitions from the Victoria Miro gallery Courtesy: Victoria Miro
One of the newest creative tools at the gallery’s disposal for Live / Archive is what is known as a “curve editor”, which enables the team to generate a video walkthrough, once a virtual exhibition with 3D captures of paintings and sculptures, and without having to bring in a videographer.
Oliver Miro and his team delight in the developing fidelity with which they can show, in the Vortic-powered Live / Archive, the reflection of light off objects, walls and floors; whether it enhances the three-dimensionality of a sculpture, the shine on a glitter ball or the haunting reflections of Paula Rego’s canvases—in the exhibition The Forgotten (19 November 2021 – 12 February 2022)—captured in the polished concrete floor of the Victoria Miro gallery’s main space in London.
Working through the Live / Archive platform is to be reminded of the importance of what the great British architect Edwin Lutyens called the “fall of light”. Likewise of the advice that another 20th-century titan, Louis Kahn, gave to architectural students at Pratt Institute in New York in the 1960s, inspiring, among others, the late visionary artist, playwright and designer Robert Wilson: “Students, start with light.”