With the outbreak of Corona virus you will have noticed a huge increase in different businesses advertising a “virtual” experience in some form or another. However, what you can expect to experience will vary drastically.

Virtual art exhibition general take the following forms:

Virtual Art Exhibitions (general)

A collection of photographed artworks that are presented together in an online catalogue or directory format. Allowing the viewer to slide or click through the collection, viewing each piece in turn or as a series of smaller thumbnails to see the collection in part or as a whole.

Virtual Art Exhibitions (Video)

A video recording taken from a physically hung art exhibition. Where you are shown each piece in turn at the discretion of the film maker.

Virtual 3D Interactive Art Exhibitions

These are collections of photographed artworks that have been curated and presented in a three dimensional virtual model environment, similar to that found in computer games. Each photographed artwork is placed into the model environment proportionate in scale to the space and as a three dimensional object, responds to the viewer’s viewpoint. As the viewer moves around the space each object changing in scale and perspective, given a very close replication to an actual physical gallery experience.

When we are talking about a virtual exhibition we are referring to 3D interactive virtual exhibitions.

During the building and research for creating The Absent Gallery we looked into several different online platforms that are available to help you get straight to it.

This isn’t a review of different 3d virtual platform so please do consider making your own research to find the one that works best for you. Some seem to offer more for less and others offer less for more. Just check the terms and conditions and avoid any of the free platforms, you get what you pay for and free often means that you will be granting access to your artwork for other people to use to curate their own exhibitions, not good if you want to protect your reputation. Each will have something different to provide in terms of  choice of virtual environments, amount of artwork that you can upload, payment structures, functionality and general quality of rendering.

All the ones that we have come across will allow for either a free subscription, which restrictions, or a 7 day trial. It is worth just  trying a small collection of artwork in a potential platform before you commit as adding artwork can be quite a time consuming process which we won’t want to repeat too many times.

The platform that we would personally recommend is provided by Kunstmatrix.com This is a subscription based platform starting from around £10 month for the smallest package which is plenty to get you started and perfect if you are looking to have a short term exhibition. With even the smallest subscription package you get access to around 15 environments, plus you can run 5 different 3D exhibitions. You can easily upgrade to a higher tier of subscription which will give you more space in the “art depot” and even more live 3D exhibitions.

Augmented Reality

The game changer with the platform provided by Kunstmatrix is their integrated augmented reality app, which is available as standard acroos all subscription packages.  Put simply augmented reality gives each visitor the ability to bring any piece of artwork featured in your gallery straight into their homes via the screens of their mobile devices. The app is currently only available for iPhones and iPads but we understand that an app for Android devices will be available soon.

*Please note we have no affiliation or finanical incentive for recommending Kunstmatrix.

Getting Started

Whichever platform provider you choose the following process is pretty much generic but for the purpose of this resource we will be referring specifically to the Kunstmatrix platform.

Images

You will want to start with some really good images of your artwork, as there is no point exhibiting rubbish photographs. Think of this as being the foundations upon which you will build on. Professionally photographed work is preferred but if not there are plenty of resources out there on the internet to help you take the best photos of your artwork that you can. 

You will need to edit your images, even if it is just a quick crop, and then you will need to size your images correctly so that they can be uploaded onto your platform. There are several photo editing software applications out there but by far the best is Photoshop by Adobe. They do a month by month subscription for around £19 per month with a 7 day free trial.  There is also an abundance of tutorials and videos on the internet for doing pretty much anything on Photoshop.

There will be restrictions on the file and image size that you can upload. Typically this is less than 5MB and images around 1900px on their longest edge. The best file size to aim for is around 2.6MB, this will make the viewer’s experience of looking around your exhibition better as it will reduce loading and processing time.

Jpeg or PNG files are typically asked for, if you are not sure which is which stick with jpegs. PNG files do not compress an image as a jpeg does, because of this PNG files are going to be larger file size.

Information

You will need the following information so it is a good idea to get this ready to hand. The artwork’s title, name of artist, dimensions (cm) width, height and depth, medium, genre, price and maybe a website link if you want to direct enquires to a particular page, like a contact page or product page on your own website. The default link with Kunstmatrix will take visitors to a generic contact page which is linked to the email address that you provide so don’t worry if you haven’t got anywhere to send people.

Very important!! Enter the dimensions correctly as this is used by the platform’s matrix to scale your work correctly and in proportion to the chosen environment and it is used to display the artwork correctly when people are using the augmented reality app.

Choosing your Environment

It is important to pick the right virtual environment that suits and can accommodate your collection before you get too stuck in to curating. Place a few pieces in the environment to get a feel for the space before you decide. Even after you have chosen a room you can very easily change the room completely, but be warned that this will ruin your careful curation.

Placing Artwork

This is the fun part that you have been working towards. Now that you have your art depot ready and your environment chosen you can start dragging and dropping work into place using the very simple and easy to use system that puts you in the virtual environment and enables you to move around swapping paintings around and so forth.

Finishing up and Publishing

That is pretty much it, you are almost there. You will probably want to create an exhibition title image for the entrance of your exhibition and think of a good title etc….then you are ready to publish.

Once you have published your exhibition you can recreate the viewing window and allow visitors to walk around your virtual exhibition from your own website, but most importantly please do share it with The Absent Gallery so that we can help you promote and share your exhibition through our combined networks. The code is found on the Kunstmatrix.com website on your control panel, just copy and then paste it into your website. You will need to have backend access to your website in order to add the code and have some knowledge of website construction. If you are unsure best to ask the website creator to help you.

Ultimately this is what we are here for, so don’t panic if you haven’t got a website or can not add the code. We can add your virtual exhibition to one of our galleries so you have somewhere to send people.

When you are ready to share your virtual exhibition with The Absent Gallery paste the code that you have copied from the platform provider into the contact form here

This will enable The Absent Gallery to help host and promote your virtual exhibition to the best of our ability. 

If you feel that building a 3D Virtual Exhibition is beyond your capabilities or time constraints, we would be happy to discuss your proposed exhibition to see if we can help you or your group. Contact