VIVE Arts, a global initiative aimed at enhancing artistic creation and appreciation through the latest technologies, has partnered with renowned artist and filmmaker Marco Brambilla to bring the artist’s latest artwork, Heaven’s Gate, to HTC VIVE’s new immersive glasses, VIVE Flow. Heaven’s Gate will debut on VIVE Flow in an exclusive event at Art Basel Miami Beach on Friday, December 3 at the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
Photos – VIVE Arts archive ©
“We’re thrilled to work with Marco Brambilla. His forward-thinking, thought-provoking approach in Heaven’s Gate challenges the viewers’ senses while pushing the boundaries of immersion when viewed in VIVE Flow. This partnership advances VIVE Arts’ mission, enabling artists to achieve their creative vision through digital innovation in the arts, democratizing creativity and preserving cultural heritage for the world,” said Celina Yeh, Executive Director, VIVE Arts.
VIVE Arts was established in 2017 and over the last five years, the art and technology program has partnered with leading international artists and institutions to create ground-breaking digital artworks and exhibits, transforming how art and culture can be experienced.
VIVE Arts has enabled institutions to add a powerful new dimension to their exhibitions and storytelling through VR, engaging new and diverse audiences around the world, including Mona Lisa: Beyond the Glass at the Musée du Louvre in Paris; Curious Alice at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London; and Claude Monet, The Water Lily Obsession at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. By bringing Heaven’s Gate to VIVE Flow, VIVE Arts are bringing the art-viewing experience to a new medium: immersive glasses.
“Art is a medium that feeds our emotions and promotes mindful contemplation, which fits perfectly with the philosophy behind our new VIVE Flow immersive glasses, designed from the ground up to help people focus on how they feel. Together with Marco Brambilla’s remarkable Heaven’s Gate, we’re shaping the next evolution of the art-viewing experience that elevates the senses and makes art more accessible to everyone around the world,” said Cher Wang, Co-Founder and Chairman of HTC.
Weighing about the same as a chocolate bar at 189 grams, VIVE Flow’s lightweight, dual-hinge design makes artwork and exhibits more immersive and portable – making it easier to enjoy art, anytime, anywhere. Its 3D spatial audio augments the visual experience of Heaven’s Gate and transports viewers to a deeper viewing experience. The glasses form factor of VIVE Flow also provides viewers with personal, intimate space as they ascend through Brambilla’s overwhelming spectacle of Hollywood fantasy while creating a collective experience with others seeing Heaven’s Gate in VIVE Flow.
“The VIVE Arts installation at Pérez Art Museum Miami will be the first time a large group will be able to enter the world of Heaven’s Gate together. This democratization of VR technology is perfectly suited to the tone of the piece and will enhance my retelling of the seven levels of purgatory as a communal experience,” says Brambilla.
Marco Brambilla’s Heaven’s Gate is a video installation in which the viewer levitates through seven fantastical vertical landscapes of seamlessly collaged film samples. A lavish, satirical and vertigo-inducing take on the silver screen spectacle of Hollywood dreams and excesses, Heaven’s Gate both celebrates collective storytelling consciousness and satirizes its saturated glamour. Created as a VR experience and totemic video installation, the work ascends through the seven levels of Purgatory, each stage its own landscape of looping samples lifted from iconic moments of cinematic history.
Through this absorbing work of digital psychedelia, Brambilla highlights the sensory overload of today’s compendium of popular culture to engulf the viewer’s senses with a hyper-saturation of imagery almost impossible to sustain.
“In the work, Brambilla makes visible the concomitant tensions present in religion, industry and celebrity, ascension and fall, innocence and experience, vanity and pageantry, sexuality and awakening, simplicity and excess. Speaking the language of Hollywood’s dream factory, it communicates a nostalgia that feels at once familiar and uncanny and seemingly appropriate to the mood of 2020, where media saturation created a convergence of fact and fiction in a voracious cycle of introspection and collective anxiety. Heaven’s Gate likewise unravels into a dreamlike spectacle of virtual chaos. The work produces an overpowering labyrinth of labyrinths, a sinuous spreading visual maze that seems to encompass the past and the future. In some way, it involves stars,” an extract from Daniel Birnbaum’s essay “Marco Brambilla’s Labyrinth of Labyrinths.”
Heaven’s Gate’s debut in VIVE Flow introduces our ongoing collaboration with Brambilla in VR, tech and digital art to build a diverse ecosystem that complements and pushes the boundaries of Marco’s practice. Brambilla’s dissection of contemporary culture and digital consumption encapsulates VIVE Arts commitment to fusing art and technology to explore the experiential possibilities of both.
Heaven’s Gate is on installation at the Pérez Art Museum Miami through early 2022, including a VR viewing room with VIVE Focus 3, HTC VIVE’s all-in-one wireless headset with outstanding visuals, ergonomic design and superior audio.
