Deep Fakes: Art and its Double shows 21 high-tech artworks and various virtual experiences. It is held in Switzerland until February 2022 and stands out for its new technology, revolutionizing the way of conceiving, creating and experiencing art.
As a novelty, visitors to the Deep Fakes: Art and its Double exhibition will have front-row seats to view the combination of Digital Projection’s Satellite MLS system with Multi-View 3D projection technology. This serves to help reconstruct Michaelsberg Abbey, a 1,000-year-old Benedictine church in the UNESCO world heritage site of Bamberg, Germany. Moreover, is the first exhibition to deal with this technological transformation at scale and intensity, in a total of 1000 m2.
Sarah Kenderdine, the exhibition’s curator and EPFL Pavilions director, explains that it is “the culmination of several years of new creative practices emerging from the world of computer science”. Kenderdine also comments that these artifacts are based on existing works of art, such as «great cultural forgeries».
Curiosities about the exhibition
For the Deep Fakes exhibition, the Virtual Reality and Visualization Research group at Weimar’s Bauhaus University and spin-off company Consensive developed real-time rendering techniques for ArcTron’s 3D models, allowing them to be presented in immersive VR using Multi-View, Digital Projection’s multi-user 3D projection technology.
The Digital Projection system in Lausanne, which was also installed by Bauhaus University, comprises one INSIGHT Satellite MLS 4K HFR 360 projector, along with six pairs of Volfoni-made glasses. Using the ultra-fast frame rates (360fps) unique to Multi-View, this single projector is able to provide a true 3D experience to several viewers, each of whom has a view of the exhibit that remains appropriate to their changing position. This allows the users to see and interact with each other in a truly shared collaborative manner.
“Instead of providing 120 frames per second, which is enough only for single-user 3D, the INSIGHT Satellite MLS 4K HFR 360 delivers an unrivalled 360 frames,” confirms Kenderdine, who says the technology is quite simply revolutionary for heritage experts, in that it can provide everyone viewing a digital artwork with a shared experience. “Giving each user a unique perspective on an object provides us with unpredicted ways to collaborate,” she enthuses.
In Satellite MLS (Modular Laser System) spec, the INSIGHT Satellite MLS 4K HFR 360 offers museum professionals an even more compelling solution for modern multi-media exhibitions, explains Digital Projection's Thierry Ollivier, who is leading the company’s involvement in the Deep Fakes project.
With this satellite, the small, lightweight projector head is dissociated from the light source, which allows for bright, 4K projection with a compact footprint and minimal noise/heat generation near the exhibits themselves. This unique design, says Ollivier, makes Satellite MLS ideal for theatres and opera houses, historic buildings, and other heat/space-restricted applications.
Technologies such as Multi-View and Satellite MLS will play an increasingly important role in future art and museum exhibitions, where AV will help immerse visitors in ever-more interactive experiences.
Kenderdine concludes “these tools offer new ways to tell stories: stories that are not necessarily didactic, stories that are emerging and responding to user interaction, and stories visitors can embody and inhabit. AV opens up the archive and gives it so much more potential for reuse. It gives artists and creators and curators a new canvas to create aesthetic frameworks we have never seen before, and modalities of engagement which transport and delight visitors”.
