Responses by Bluecadet and Christie’s.
Background: Bluecadet collaborated with auction house Christie’s and Brooklyn-based design firm Chemistry Creative to design and build a custom interactive experience for Christie’s exhibition Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection at the Rockefeller Center. Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection consists of more than 150 masterpieces spanning 500 years of art history from the personal collection of philanthropist Paul G. Allen, cofounder of Microsoft. Garnering more than $1.5 billion at auction, the collection is the most valuable private collection in auction history. In accordance with Allen’s wishes, the estate dedicated all proceeds of the auction to philanthropy. To do service to this collection, Christie’s commissioned its first interactive, virtual experience to accompany the exhibition.
Design thinking: Bluecadet helped Christie’s showcase the Paul G. Allen Collection in an innovative, immersive way. A fifteen-foot LED wall displayed key artworks at larger-than-life scale, filling the room with the brushstrokes and masterful techniques of 500 years of masterpieces in brilliant resolution and vibrant color.
Four large touchscreen stations displayed the collection along a timeline and enabled visitors to encounter the collection with contextual content, both art-historical and personal to Allen. “Visionary Moments” from Botticelli to Hockney told the collection’s story as one of groundbreaking artists pushing the boundaries of how we think about art. Quotes from Allen on the power of art surfaced as visitors applied “lenses” to the vast collection—for example, a “Coding Vision” lens spoke to Allen’s fascination with pointillism and its connection to coding and bytes.
At each interactive station, visitors could dive deeper into a single work, providing context and offering high-resolution images of the artworks that they could zoom into to see fine details. Chemistry Creative provided technological infrastructure and fabrication.
Visual influences: Our approach was largely influenced by the content itself: we wanted to leverage the artworks in a way that only digital means could manage while respecting the art as a source and not overly manipulating it. Visually, we focused on large-scale magnification to highlight the original pieces’ artistry at a level of detail difficult to experience when simply standing in front of them. Taking a closer look brought visitors into the pieces and let them analyze details and compare techniques rooted in different art movements and time periods.
To create a deeper sense of immersion, we modified the physical space as well as the digital components within it: large screens in the back featured ambient flyover details of the works with the slight angle of the walls representing Allen’s forward thinking. We additionally lined the walls with LED light strips color-matched to the artwork displayed on the primary canvas. Through color, the room felt as though it was transforming into the space of the painting itself. Multiple stations encouraged high engagement by letting multiple users participate in the experience at once.
Favorite details: We were especially proud of the sleek design, the intuitive user experience and the dynamism of the installation, using lighting and large-scale displays to create an immersive, interactive experience that offers a new way for Christie’s visitors and clients to explore these masterpieces. We were honored to participate in this event, to be trusted to support Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection and to work alongside Christie’s in preparation for this historic auction.
Time constraints: Due to the timeframe of the project—six weeks—we decided to keep the technological framework relatively simple. We knew early on that we would include a timeline interactive, so we knew that gesture-based tracking would be a challenge to implement and likely not be the best technological choice in a setting with a high volume of guests. The resulting touchscreen experience fit the gallery’s context and only had a few technical setbacks.
Specific project demands: Christie’s is a world-class institution with amazing creative infrastructure and attention to detail. The meticulous way in which its team photographs and documents each lot enabled a smooth integration of the content into the experience. Working with such incredible content enabled us to dedicate our focus to other elements of the project, such as the interactive features and user experience.
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