₁ IMPULS: Viva Frida Kahlo – Institute of Design & Communication

As a first impulse and a kind of retrospect I would like to present my visit to the Viva Frida Kahlo exhibition in Vienna, which serves as a perfect introduction and insight into the fascinating potential uses of VR/AR and immersive experiences in general.

The exhibition presents itself in a format that has now been used to portray great artists and topics, including Van Gogh and Tutankhamun – and of course the artist Frida Kahlo and her story. Kahlo’s life story and artistic works were presented in various digital formats – on the one hand, the digitized paintings were projected onto the walls and floors of the exhibition hall using high-performance projectors, creating the opportunity to move freely through the artist’s visual world in this space.

On the other hand, there was also a VR experience in which visitors wearing VR glasses embarked on an approximately 10-minute journey through parts of Frida Kahlo’s life. The fascinating thing about this exhibition, both the immersive room projection and the VR experience, was the extent to which an actually empty room, a hall without any exhibits, managed to create an entire, three-dimensional visual world of images. By picking up typical elements from the art and style of Frida Kahlo, a colorful picture of the artist and her works was created, who, in addition to her quite colorful-looking art, had a life marked by illness/injury. In particular, the view through the VR glasses, in which you sit in Frida Kahlo’s bed and “fly” through her life, created a closeness that made it possible to identify with the artist’s life and thus also to understand her works.

This exhibition really serves as the perfect first example of my series of extended and virtual realities, as it just barely leaves the “real” world, expanding upon it through various means, immersing even people who usually would not be in touch with such technologies.