Beyond the Walls: Experience the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Virtual Reality

In this painting, Frederic Edwin Church has taken the aurora borealis—ethereal, dynamic, and alien—and captured it in oil paint, making you believe that you are standing underneath that phenomenon, witnessing the colors reflected off the ice. In VR, you can stand closer to the painting than might ever be permitted in real life, allowing you to examine its texture and observe its rich custom frame. VR users standing in front of the painting can trigger a teleportation hotspot which sends them to a remote mountain in Iceland, where they are suddenly in a dark landscape, looking around at jaw-dropping, 360-degree 6K video footage of an actual aurora blazing in the sky, provided by designer and photographer Olafur Haraldsson. The ability to compare and contrast the two scenes offers rich opportunities for learning and observation.

In 1885, Marian Hooper “Clover” Adams, an amateur photographer and the wife of the writer Henry Adams, committed suicide by drinking poisonous chemicals used to develop film. Her grieving husband commissioned prominent sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create a memorial to her that would express the Buddhist idea of nirvana, a state of being beyond joy and sorrow. Saint-Gaudens modeled a powerful shrouded figure, and then worked closely with architect Stanford White, who designed a secluded, contemplative setting for Clover’s gravesite in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C.. Decades later, the Smithsonian American Art Museum acquired a bronze cast made after the original in the cemetery. When standing in front of SAAM’s bronze cast in VR, you can choose to teleport to Clover’s actual gravesite, coming face-to-face with the same sculpture, but this time in the context of the private outdoor memorial for which it was originally intended. Soft sunshine filters through a bank of trees, which move softly in the background, and the bench surrounding the sculpture allows for a moment of quiet contemplation. Flashing back and forth between the museum’s version and the outdoor version, you can notice the differences, sometimes subtle, that distinguish the two casts, and the effects of weather on the outdoor installation.

The original marble sculpture of the Greek Slave propelled its artist, Hiram Powers, to international stardom. The Greek Slave was almost immediately associated with the anti-slavery movement in the United States, as abolitionists used images of it to promote their cause. The 3D model that appears in the VR app was rendered from a scan of the original plaster model that dates to 1843; in fact, this VR edition is a not work that exists in the real world at all. The presence of this sculpture in VR provides an opportunity to draw parallels between contemporary 3D scanning technology and nineteenth-century mechanical reproduction techniques, and to talk about the slippery (and often unhelpful) concept of “the original,” when it comes to sculpture.

The only contemporary artwork to appear in the Beyond the Walls VR experience is a selection from a video installation by Los Angeles-based artist Alex Prager. When you experience it in the physical museum, Face in the Crowd is installed in a black box gallery, where video plays asynchronously on three of the walls. The experience in VR looks no different, with one notable exception: the artist herself is standing in the room with you. You can walk up to Prager (or around her—she was volumetrically scanned and has been fully rendered in three dimensions) as she tells you about the inspiration for her artwork as you experience it “together.”  Prager’s artwork deals with the anxiety of being swept up by the masses while trying to create and maintain a sense of self—conditions long present in the physical world—and how this anxiety can be amplified in the virtual spaces we inhabit today.