VR exhibition planning launched during Freize Week

Digital view of Custot Gallery, Dubai, as rendered by Ikonospace to enable three-dimensional exhibition planning. Image courtesy of Ikonospace

Planning an exhibition is far more than artwork selection. As anyone involved in the production side of an art show will tell you, the point at which the artworks arrive in the gallery or exhibition space is almost the last stage in a long chain of decisions mostly revolving around designing the show within the given space. Currently, most common way of planning is to make a physical maquette of the space and then use tiny paper images of the artworks to give a sense of what the real exhibition will look like.

Technical wiz-kids around the world are trying to work out ways to make this process quicker and to move it into the digital age. With that in mind, a brand new software was launched this week at Frieze London. 

During the Blueprint Breakfast Meetings (organised by Vastari), leading art professionals in London for this year’s Frieze Art Fair gathered in Cromwell Place in South Kensington to talk about the future of the art world.  One of those presentations was introducing Ikonospace, a company founded earlier this year in Dubai by Joris Demnard and Walter Paice.

For the London event, the pair produced a virtual reality rendering of The Pavilion gallery at Cromwell Place, which is still in the planning stages and is due to open in 2019. It is a new location planned to function as a permanent art fair, where international galleries can temporarily rent spaces for pop-up exhibitions. Ikonospace were given access to the floor plans and were therefore able to build a virtual exhibition in a virtual place and for this inaugural presentation, they filled it with Norman Seeff photographs in a digital exhibition. 

Then, they demonstrated the capacity of the software. Dedicated to three-dimensional exhibition design and management and developed through virtual reality technology, the software has the ability to show any space in three-dimensions and it is really easy to use.

Screen shot of the Ikonospace software showing distances between artworks and the height of the hang. Image courtesy Ikonospace.

An exhibition designer can upload dimensions and artworks and build a virtual version of their proposed show within a fraction of the time it might take with other digital programmes or with physical models. Importantly, as it is built digitally, any design can be easily shared among team members anywhere in the world. Interestingly, the software also has the ability to produce exhibitions that would otherwise never happen. The company are also planning to host regular digital exhibitions as well as recreate landmark exhibitions of the past.

The idea is that Ikonospace will not only make life easier for exhibition designers, galleries and art fairs but it will also introduce art lovers to another dimension of viewing. The jury is out but for now, it certainly seems interesting.

Find out more at ikonospace.art