Frameless Museum London

David Keene – June 4, 2024 – As an art lover, art collector, and all around museum rat on several continents I find most digital art exhibitions of great masters – Van Gogh, Monet, Matisse, and so forth – a massive yawn. I’d much rather stand in a room, quietly, with just the real thing and see the brush strokes with my own eyes – with, sure, some digital storytelling tied in. There is so much exciting possibility for what our AV industry can bring to museums, but just blasting pixels of The Starry Night onto a wall is not it. (Reminded a bit of Joni Mitchell’s famous quote. She bristled on stage once when someone yelled from the crowd for her to play Both Sides Now, again. She replied “nobody ever said to Van Gogh, ‘…paint Starry Night again, man!’” But that was before the digital age.

It’s refreshing when digital is done right, with creativity not just cloning and upcycling images. A few legacy museums have done it right – using digital to augment or comment on but not 100% stand in for the original art – but a new attempt at an all-digital space is pretty interesting: the ‘Frameless’ museum in London. It uses a lot of interactive elements, and animations of art, with what CT – Creative Technology – claims is 450 million pixels and 1,000,000 lumens of video projection.

It’s the UK’s biggest, permanent immersive art experience, housed in the Marble Arch Place in London, the space covers almost 3,000 square meters and showcases about 40 different digital interpretations of 28 of “the world’s most iconic artists.”

You can get a good idea of the video technology at play in CT’s nice write-up, here.