Aaron Tonks is a specialist practitioner for BA (Hons) Photography at Blackpool School of Arts and coordinator for the school's gallery. His current research project The VR Gallery Project is enabling "creative art students (or any artists for that matter) to pre-visualise their work within a gallery environment and experiment with the scale of their art works." He continues "Art students do not tend to present their work in a gallery space until the end of their study and because they do not (necessarily) have any prior experience of exhibiting, they do not know how their work is going to look in a given space."
"Virtual Reality (VR) technology has finally arrived at a point where it can deliver what has long been promised: A totally immersive and ‘real’ experience that is completely believable. So can we use it, in the classroom or studio as a pre-visualisation tool for artists to experiment with scale."
But, at the time of writing, there is a global pandemic among us which has caused art galleries globally to temporarily close leaving artists who were due to exhibit without a space. This is particular noteworthy for students who are due to graduate this summer as they may potentially miss out on an opportunity to exhibit their work for the first time as well as missing out on the opportunity to learn valuable skills about this part of the industry.
"The current covid-19 crisis could be an opportunity for VR to present a very real alternative to physical galleries and exhibitions."
The VR Gallery Project could be a perfectly timed gift for graduating students. Not only does it provide an outlet for students to visualise their work on the walls of a gallery, it could be implemented in so many ways to support students in the coming 'socially distanced' months. The individual gallery spaces can be completed mimicked within VR to recreate what would have been and this opens up a world of possibilities for artists who are currently missing out.
Of course, VR headsets are not present in every home but with The VR Gallery Project, exhibitions can be turned into videos to share online in a more accessible format. This project really could be a solution to a global problem within the photography community.
For more information on The VR Gallery Project click here
Or visit http://www.blackpoolphotography.net
This Blog was written for Resolved Photographic by Claire Watt
Comments