Van Gogh Immersive Journey review: An ideal way to engage youngsters
Van Gogh Dublin: An Immersive Journey, at the RDS.
I’m all in favour of bringing artwork to the masses and the Van Gogh Immersive Journey currently underway in Dublin is a good way of doing it, particularly if you’re trying to engage youngsters.
For generation TikTok, where everyone’s a digital native, offering a high-tech, multisensory experience as a means of appreciating Van Gogh’s most famous paintings sounds like a winner.
It starts off well as small groups of viewers are brought into a cube-shaped room of ‘infinity mirrors’ where small light bulbs suspended on long leads change colour and seem to run on forever in every direction. It’s a visual and technological treat, even if you’re not quite sure where the centre of gravity is and what your position is within that room. It’s kind of mind-bending and exciting and not really like anything I’ve seen before.
The next experience is in a 20,000 sq ft experimental gallery space where the sensation of having stepped inside the frames of various Van Gogh paintings gets underway.
The traditional boundary between artist and spectator evaporates as animated room-size projections swirl around you, through 360 degrees. Van Gogh’s famous Sunflowers explode in digital form, sweeping across walls and under your feet. Crows from his famous Wheatfield with Crows beat their wings across giant screens; stars start to populate the sky in The Starry Night; the homely faces of peasants in The Potato Eaters become animated, and the painter’s bedroom in Arles, in the Yellow House, fills up with the furniture we all recognise from that famous bedroom painting.
It’s living, breathing artwork, unfolding before you and it’s done to the accompaniment of soaring cinematic scores, which pump around the gallery space as all 2,000-plus of Van Gogh’s artworks flash before you in another part of the show, in an AI experience that is nothing like standing in a traditional art gallery.
It’s an enjoyable immersive experience that will appeal in particular to a generation that likes everything to be game-ified.
I can’t say that it’s a more satisfying experience than going to an actual gallery. It’s all over so fast – about 50 minutes - and that includes a couple of other digital shows that have more in common with Dr Who than Van Gogh. Having travelled from Cork, it was too short to be worth the journey for the exhibition alone.
The whole thing whips along at a rate of knots and there’s not necessarily any real learning from it. For me, there’s no substitute for the real thing. Save up for that trip to Amsterdam and head for the Van Gogh Museum.
- The Van Gogh Immersive Journey runs at the Shelbourne Hall in the RDS, Dublin, until August 4.
- Tickets are available at vangoghdublin.com. Ticket Prices (not including booking fees): Adult, €25; Child 5-12 years, €15; Concessions (Student/OAP), €23.; Under 5s: FREE (but must have a ticket) .
