Limited Edition Issue 10 | Page 12

how-to

Create a Virtual Exhibition

by Caroline Wheaton and Henriette van der Does

A New Kind of Gallery Experience. Virtual exhibitions are a relatively new addition to our lives - something which has until quite recently been the preserve of big galleries, museums and art fairs.

Most have used a 360-degree “video” of their real-life gallery exhibits in order to give virtual viewers a tour around an already curated, physical exhibition.

There are some obvious benefits to this such as opening exhibitions to a wider public and being able to give more detail to viewers as they walk round both visually and aurally.

However, it was the global pandemic which allowed these virtual exhibitions to come into their own and they exploded onto the scene as we found ourselves denied access to cultural spaces which are so central to our leisure time and cultural well-being.

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Choosing the Software and Set-up. Over the last year, we have seen smaller galleries moving to this medium but for organisations like ours, with no permanent exhibition space, the issue of having no physical exhibition to film or video creates an issue. 

With restrictions in place, we could not set up an exhibition in a physical venue and then walk round with a camera; we had to imagine the space and create it from scratch.

This requires a different type of technology to that mentioned above and in researching the possibilities, we found that, unfortunately for us, one of the obvious drawbacks of a 2D medium is showing 3D works.