SFMOMA
THE MAGRITTE INTERPRETIVE GALLERY
Augmented Reality Installation
Client: SFMOMA
Role: Program Manager / Film Producer
Date: 2018
Website: frog design, SFMOMA
Press: Mashable, SF Chronicle
NOTICE – This project was completed while working at frog design. All rights to the project belong to frog design and the client. Portfolio Link.
San Francisco Museum of Modern art is one of the most influential cultural institutions on the west coast, as well as one of the must-see stops for tourists who visit here. They have also become recognized by the art world as a leader in how new technologies can both deepen appreciation of art to existing audiences, as well as bring art to new ones. Every couple years they have a highly anticipated (and publicized) special exhibition that opens in the spring and runs for about six months. This year’s art exhibition features an augmented reality gallery conceived, designed and built by frog design.
Generally speaking, companies come to frog for answers that will lead to business or brand transformation (and ultimately, commercial success). For SFMOMA, frog had the rare chance to raise unanswerable questions inspired by Magritte, the undisputed master of visual enigmas. It was also a unique opportunity for us to work on an experience for the sake of the experience, as opposed to commercial gain. Usually we launch something to market and test/learn from there, whereas for this project, we had one shot and it had to be perfect.
“The whole experience for us has been wild and wonderful.
”
Our work is the last gallery museum goers pass through after seeing some of his most famous and never-before-seen works on display. As the last stop, we had the incredible challenge of figuring out how to help viewers both understand and experience the nuances of Magritte’s questioning, his love of visual puns, and his interest in “the real with the mystery that is in the real.” We created four of these “windows” using stereoscopic computer vision to produce an augmented reality that invites visitors to step into the painting and be “seen” as the world beyond.
The show, René Magritte: The Fifth Season opened to the public on May 19th and it is the first such exhibition to look exclusively at Magritte’s late career. It “examines his most important bodies of work from the 1940s through the 1960s, and shows how they marked a fundamental shift in painting from Modernism to our own time.” Called the Interpretive Gallery, this immersive environment is intended to take visitors into Magritte’s imagination, where the window motif (seen in works like The Human Condition) now exists in the physical world.
