We The Italians | Italian design: Virtual galleries, beauty at home at the time of the pandemic

Italian design: Virtual galleries, beauty at home at the time of the pandemic

Italian design: Virtual galleries, beauty at home at the time of the pandemic

  • WTI Magazine #133 Nov 14, 2020
  • 1006

If we were in normal times, in the afternoon we would be strolling through the galleries of Italian cities visiting the open exhibitions of the week and immersing ourselves in the somewhat artificial and decadent glam of openings and vernissages. But we have to stay at home and we put ourselves in the hands of the internet in an attempt to absorb our weekly dose of "virtual" art that in these moments is needed more than ever.

And then I ask myself: which new and unexplored frontiers will reserve us this great virtual beauty "at home" consumed today comfortably on the sofa of our house?

I collect some clues, accomplice the scholar and writer Mario Gerosa, and I venture in search of a possible answer.

Meanwhile it must be said that the word of the year according to the Collins Dictionary for 2020 is “lockdown”. Followed by social distancing, key worker and coronavirus. Curiously, there is no "virtual" word, a concept that in recent months has slowly become a habit of life in Italy too, evoked millions of times in the calls that replace the meetings in presence.

Maybe it doesn't appear because it doesn't seem so strange, it's not so much the daughter of a weird time, but it has become part of our lives for years, without us noticing it.

In hindsight, a first wave of virtual was already recorded in the early years of the twenty-first century, when the forerunners of virtual worlds, especially Second Life in 2005, lived its golden age. It imposed the idea of a parallel life, to be lived through our own virtual twin, ready to venture into the ethereal territories of an expanding universe that exists only in the web, distinguished by an enormous wealth of content.

Since then, between ups and downs, virtual has become more and more rooted in our daily life, without bothering to impose itself to the skeptics and reserving interesting surprises to its supporters.

Then, in this difficult 2020, virtual has undergone a sudden acceleration. The pandemic, which has drastically reduced the opportunities to be together, abruptly eliminating the concept of normality, revolutionizing our habits, has forced us to adopt new rules, new parameters. And that's when established rituals, such as a visit to a museum or a vernissage in an art gallery, suddenly became anomalies of a system out of control.

For this reason, instantaneous solutions became necessary, which became immediately available. In this sense virtual, in its various declensions, came to help. This spring, one after the other, numerous exhibitions organized in art galleries have been cancelled in Italy, as well as emblazoned fairs that had to temporarily close their doors because of covid.

To make up for this lack, virtual exhibitions have been set up in record time, designed to be a valid alternative to classic exhibitions, in the physical world, trying to invent original and unprecedented solutions.

One of the most interesting examples was proposed by the Milanese gallery owner Massimo De Carlo, who created a virtual space called Vspace. It proposes on the internet the same environments of the real gallery: spaces that can be covered with the help of computer keyboard keys or, to have a more immersive experience, with an Oculus type viewer.

The idea of the virtual gallery has also been welcomed by other internationally renowned galleries, such as Hauser and Wirth, who a few months ago presented HWVR, a virtual reality platform to visit their digital exhibitions with various devices, from the smartphone to the viewer.

Still others have structured other examples of great interest, which focus on a broad idea of environment, not necessarily linked to a spatial concept of architectural matrix. This is the case of the Viewing Rooms proposed by Art Basel and Frieze in the days of the fairs: these are virtual places that include images of the works proposed by the various galleries and comments by critics and curators.

In these months the case histories in Italy have multiplied and we have seen many examples that interpret this challenge in different ways.

There are the visits of museums and galleries proposed on the web with models made with special 360° cameras, to make tours in environments very faithful to the real ones, as well as there are platforms to create virtual do-it-yourself galleries. And then there are platforms such as Vortic VR that prefer XR, the so-called Cross Reality, allowing the visitors to visit their virtual one having the impression of moving in a space where they meet three-dimensional objects, which offer an almost tactile experience.

There are many examples. To establish some order and to imagine a visionary future (but not too much) Mario Gerosa, writer and scholar of digital cultures who invented the first travel agency of Second Life, can help.

"The virtual gallery - argues Gerosa - must already represent an original experience in the first instance. The gallery space must be in itself a communication tool, perhaps even a sort of work of art, and not a simple container. In reality, galleries built with lime and brick cannot change substantially over time, let alone live. Digital ones can. One could think of elastic spaces, with walls that shrink or expand, that speak or cry or laugh, emotional spaces that are in tune with the work, but above all that amplify and give back the emotions that the visitor feels when observing a certain work".

"In the near future - he continues - it is conceivable to use artificial intelligence to make this experience more engaging. The A.I., in fact, memorizes the behavior of the users, the paths, the time spent in front of each work, the amount of people who gather in front of a painting.  A lot of useful information to modify, for example, even during the time in which the exhibition is programmed, the structure of the exhibition up to the way in which the single works are exposed".

And then there are the human avatars. "In the future - he concludes - it will be imaginable to think of a person, possibly a tour guide equipped with a video camera, physically inside the real museum, who becomes the alter ego of the visitor comfortably seated in the sofa from home remotely.  The visitor virtually enters the museum from his computer and observes the works through his personal intermediary".

Waiting for us, in short, "real avatars", who can comment for us live on the works, zoom in for us on the details, share experiences. Real avatar to visit the exhibitions through an intermediary ... but will they also be our future office colleagues?