In recent years, with creativity extrapolating the limits of what is real and digital, art installations have been gaining more and more space and showing an efficient strategy of guerrilla marketing and interactivity. Whether artistic or commercial, installations have the power to engage, raise awareness and, of course, generate great selfies.
In the last decade, what art critics call the It is made Kusama. The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, famous for her installations with polka dots, went on a world tour with the exhibition “Festival das Luzes”, which even went through Brazil under the name of “Infinite Obsession” in major museums such as CCBB and Instituto Tomie Ohtake in sessions exhausted. It was enough for the 88-year-old artist to see her work gain stratospheric projection due to social media, making her work, already well known by the art scene, a name recognized by the common public.
Yayoi Kusama in front of one of her instagrammable works (Disclosure)
But why have interactive works and installations generated so much interest from the general public? The Kusama effect explains. These works, in addition to pointing to the contemporary and technologically curious, are highly immersive, a little escapist, and fulfill the desire of social media users to be culturally relevant through their main currency of consumption: unique or exclusive images.
When these installations are maximized for the possibilities of digital (or generative, as we explain in this article) art, viewers have the opportunity to participate and generate content for the artwork and we designers have the opportunity to play with the boundaries.” real-virtual” adding a touch of digital dimension. The more senses this activation instigates, the more relevant it becomes to the audience.
Theorizing just a little further, at the turn of the century the American author B. Joseph Pine II coined the term “experience economy”, the economy following the agrarian, industrial and service economy. In his view, “companies would orchestrate memorable events for their customers and that memory itself becomes the product: the ‘experience’. The most advanced companies in this sector would charge for the ‘transforming’ effect that the experience offers”. The article at the time was considered overrated and speculative, but 20 years later, we can say that Pine’s vision has come to fruition.
MATA installation in Largo da Batata (Disclosure)
One of our projects that illustrate this scenario is the MAT installation, which we produced for the 2020 Virada Cultural. To show the city a slice of the devastation in the Amazon, in which people could feel the impact of deforestation, custom software was developed to recreate the Amazon rainforest and simulate in real time a wildfire. 24 hours in an area 4 meters wide and an LED panel 8 meters high. The movement of the sun in the simulation follows synchronously with the movement of the sun at the installation site. At the time, around 10,000 people saw the installation in Largo da Batata and we gathered more than 30,000 impressions on Instagram alone.
We recently learned that London’s Frameless Museum will gain a fixed collection of immersive digital arts of great artists such as Kandinsky, Monet, Klimt and Rembrandt. To create the multi-sensory experience of being inside a frame, they use 4K projection technology capable of reproducing the works in high definition. A way to present the History of Art and its great names to new generations.
Digital artistic experience is an investment of the Frameless Museum,
in London (Disclosure)
Speaking of advertising, in Tokyo, Nike created an LED billboard in which the box pops into the eyes, giving the feeling of objects being off-screen when viewed from the correct perspective. An experience that confuses and instigates the look. If you want to follow emerging artists in this scenario, I also suggest the Refik Anadol, Ouchh Studio and double Noemi Schipfer and Takamina Kamoto, do Nonotak Studio.
Campaigns and projects that demand greater attention from the audience can find in art installations a format that arouses the curiosity of boomers and generation Z and has a high rate of organic sharing on social networks. The experience economy is in full swing and should continue to shape the way viewers consume and reproduce information.
Advertising seems to be increasingly inclined to appropriate art and technology for its campaigns. In this case, public art is confused with a product and vice versa. We no longer know if it is an authorial work, if it was supported by a brand, which often doesn’t even have its logo on the work, but reproduces the photos and videos on their networks, or if it’s just a well-made content that has nothing to do with art.
As an artist, I tend to believe that the way brands use their profits to nurture art and its creators becomes healthier. The city wins a work, the public wins in culture and the brand wins by linking its name to innovative initiatives and contributing to richer cities artistically.
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