The Grid Digital Art Gallery – a Success

Immersive Art Space Pilot in Wellington

Delainy Jamahl and his partner Shannon Brosnahan Inglis have stuck their necks on the line to investigate the potential for a dedicated immersive art space in the capital, in a New Zealand version of Melbourne’s renowned digital art gallery THE LUME. “We wanted to evaluate the public and art community’s interest in a venue capable of hosting large scale digital artwork. This pilot of The Grid is a way of testing the water. Can we create our own homegrown ecosystem for projections, soundscapes and storytelling? Can we attract audiences? Can we make this self-sustainable?”

The Space

Delainy and Shannon fell in love with the industrial mid-50s building that is, for now at least, The Grid Artspace. An almost 400sqm warehouse located in the heart of central Wellington, it was the perfect blank canvas on which to launch New Zealand’s first dedicated immersive projection environment. Delainy explains, “It was exciting to fit out a space specifically for our exhibitions, to really cater the spatial design to the work that is being presented, and also to have a space that is adaptable to different works.”

The Gear

Space located and rented, the next challenge was the fit out; “We wanted people to be able to touch and interact with the content so we required hard projection surfaces. We brought on the Tāwhiri Workshop to build four 7.2 x 4 metre walls out of plywood and MDF as our projection canvas, with a backbone of truss and pipe from our rigging supplier YOOCrew. When it came time to change over between exhibitions, we were able to reconfigure those walls in about four hours with a good team of people, so it wasn’t too demanding.”

For projection they worked with Big Picture and opted for four Barco F80- 4K12 projectors, with two disguise D3 servers for playback and a Yamaha 4.1 surround system. The data crunching requirements were significant, “On our first exhibit Rivers of Wind, we had 2.5TB of video playback, two 48 minute 8K files, outputting a resolution of 15360 x 2134.”

A second smaller room was designated for a highly interactive display using Samsung Frame TVs; “We placed a TV on a linear track and attached a draw wire encoder to it. This allowed our audience to physically move the whole screen up to seven metres on a single axis and for that movement to affect what was displayed. This acted as a window into a virtual canvas, as the screen moved it would show different parts of that canvas. Although a physically smaller installation than the main space, the virtual canvas was larger in pixels with a total resolution of 19440 x 3840.”

The team also exploited the foyer, “We designed and built a custom front desk out of LED screens and versatile aluminium extrude which visitors have loved, “It’s a good first taste of the experience the visitors are about to have.”

The Exhibits

The gallery opened to the public on 5th July with Delainy’s own mesmerising digital artwork, Rivers of Wind, which uses eight years of Wellington’s historical weather data to produce a continuous 48-minute looped work, with every second representing a day’s worth of data. “After spending time overseas I was inspired by artists who regularly combine their art with data and technology. Being based in Wellington, I know everyone has their own relationship with the weather, particularly the wind, and I wanted to capture the beauty in that chaos.”

Delainy approached composer Rhian Sheehan for a soundscape to accompany the visuals. The combination of nature, music and technology was projected onto four giant panels which line the walls of the room. Audiences were able to get up close, sit on cushions and lean on and touch the artwork to take it all in.

Rivers of Wind was followed by the Wellington premiere of the Art of Black Grace 1/5 & 2/5, two immersive dance experiences. One contains excerpts from key dance works spanning the company’s 28 years and re-imagines prominent moments in their repertoire and New Zealand history. The other is based on kinetic movement paintings, both created by renowned choreographer Neil Ieremia.

Delainy has a long relationship with Neil, involved initially in post-production through his motion design studio Artificial Imagination, and also providing onset supervision alongside their creative team, ensuring filmed content would transfer from the world of physical performance to an immersive digital experience.

The third exhibition is Nowadeus by multi-disciplinary artist Tim Christie, featuring a soundtrack composed by Tom McLeod and spatial sound mix by Mike Hodgson. “We approached Tim around four months ago to see

if he would be keen to collaborate on a new immersive experience. Our initial chats ended up lasting for a couple of hours so I knew we would get along well. Our process ended up with Tim creating the artworks and providing my studio with layered Photoshop files, and from there we recreated the artworks in a 3D pipeline for animation. The result is an immersive experience where modern-day obsessions are personified as larger than life deities.”

The Response

Delainy and Shannon have been blown away by the level of interest, “Over 1,000 visitors a week for a brand new experience is exceptional. The public’s response has been that Wellington needs this, New Zealand needs this. People have acknowledged there is real potential for dedicated spaces for these types of artworks. And for our New Zealand artists, a dedicated space that removes the technical costs of exhibiting digital works at scale is an exciting prospect. We were fortunate to have strong relationships with suppliers who believe in what we are trying to achieve and that made this pilot feasible.”

The result of Delainy and Shannon’s experiment? They are committed to making a permanent immersive art space happen, hopefully at The Grid’s current location. “We love this space so it would be wonderful if we could establish ourselves here, but we’ll see. We’re building this from the ground up, and there’s a lot of exciting steps ahead of us. Our aim is to create a space that can really showcase our epic Aotearoa-made works, and that can also bring international works here from similar spaces overseas.”

For now, Rivers of Wind is set to tour. Keep an eye out for locations to be announced.