A new permanent digital art venue in Melbourne will give art lovers a new perception of the classics, starting with Van Gogh. Anna Hayes finds out more about ‘THE LUME Melbourne’.

Canadian artist Rob Gonsalves once described his surrealist, optical illusion-esque artwork as “a window into another world”.

He was right of course, but I suspect he never expected that idea to be as literal as what’s happening in THE LUME Melbourne, a new digital art gallery set to open in Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre (MCEC) this autumn.

Patrons will be able to take a walk through Vincent Van Gogh’s most iconic works; stare up at his Starry Night, taste the wine on the table of his Cafe Terrace at Night, or potter about in the artist’s Bedroom in Arles, without having to go to MOMA NY, the Kröller-Müller Museum, or the Van Gogh Museum, respectively.

And with international travel out of the question for another while yet, a large-scale AV installation that immerses the viewer into the world of the art might be just the ticket for many.

Virtual exhibitions gained some ground during the lockdown. And, with digital signage and visual displays becoming more and more prevalent in both residential and commercial spaces, digital artists are starting to find new avenues for their work.

Grande Experiences is the company behind THE LUME Melbourne. Its head of technology and AV, Craig Smith, admits that the past year plus has seen a big shift to virtual exhibitions but THE LUME Melbourne is something else entirely.

“Grande Experiences has been at the forefront of the move from exhibitions to experiences, from static displays to meaningful, multisensory experiences. This is an active, visitor-driven, shared experience, within a massive digital gallery.”

The only ‘virtual’ aspect of the experience, he says, is the high resolution imagery of these striking works of art.

“It is the way it is displayed that makes it a completely new experience. I think, pre-COVID, we were starting to see a lot more acceptance and appreciation of the medium beyond the early adopters and digital artists. Now, more than ever, these types of experiences are culturally vital and a means to connect a diverse community.”

If you build it…

An exhibition of this scale needs plenty of space, something that Grande Experiences have in abundance at the MCEC but Craig says that the actual setup is quite modular, capable of scaling up and down from 400 to 1,000m² spaces as required.

“We have been touring multichannel projection environments in that size footprint, all over the globe, for many years now and THE LUME sites are really an innovative evolution of that. Our key principles revolve around a modular system design, that can scale up or down by location, while maintaining a digital canvas that lets our design team work unhindered.”

When looking at a new site, there are some critical technical components such as correct power availability, suitable rigging and physical size. Once those basic requirements are confirmed, it comes down to creating the guest experience, leveraging the attributes of each location and venue to create something unique, authentic, and meaningful.

“It’s really just harnessing the technology to deliver the experience. As for setup times, it’s really very site specific but in general terms, once a venue is prepared and construction is done, the AV fit-out and commissioning is a six-to-eight week process.”

Pixel perfect

So what makes this exhibition tick? We all know a Van Gogh when we see it, so how does Grande Experiences enhance the impact of the Dutch master’s work?

Craig says the foundations to the technology system are relatively straightforward but there is a lot to consider when scaling up the channel count like they do.

“Ultimately, it starts with the initial projection plot, the channel count from this will drive everything from thermal load to the venue through to the size of the control room. The plot is based on maintaining consistent pixel size and brightness across the site – this becomes our unit of measure and the quality we design too. The technology then follows to deliver that.”

A whopping 140+ Barco single chip DLP Laser projectors have been installed in Melbourne to create the desired effect.

“They have proven to have a really natural colour representation, in a very usable form factor. This all runs over Lightware signal transmission from the servers in the control room. Playback is all one-to-one, so we have a dedicated GPU output per projector running on a Dataton Watchout backend.”

Audio is a mixture of JBL in the main spatial grid and Fohhn for a discreet surround 5.1 system in an 8m 360° environment.

“Signal transport is via a Dante network fed from a 128 channel spatial DSP server. All up, the audio system in Melbourne is sitting at 91 channels patched one-to-one across the gallery.”

A recurring canvas

The beauty of THE LUME Melbourne is that the initial setup is versatile and, while not completely set in stone, it’s designed to make any change of exhibition content relatively simple.

Craig says: “When we do the initial design of a space we aren’t looking at it from a specific, single piece of content perspective. It’s that modular, digital canvas approach – from there, it gets tailored to the content. As such, when we come to the end of a run and want to flip the content to a new exhibition, it’s a bit more straightforward.”

But there are always fresh challenges with new content – a Van Gogh collection won’t fit a space in the same way that a David Hockney one will. It’s not as simple as simply flipping to a new content stream.

“A new set of content is a new chance to restart the conversation with a visitor that has been here before. Therefore we put a lot of effort into new features to the core system and to embrace whatever content specific themes we can run with.”

And it’s a mixture of all of these things that makes THE LUME Melbourne, or any of its counterparts for that matter, such an attractive offering.

“A great pixel size and brightness means nothing if there isn’t a meaningful narrative to the content or a visitor flow that encourages the visitor to explore and step out of the real world for a moment,” Craig adds.

“I think what Grande Experiences does incredibly well is to merge technology, with content and clever venue design to deliver a truly immersive experience.”