Oculus Drift
Experiencing Dali’s Dreamscapes in Virtual Reality
The highlights of Disney and Dali: Architects of the Imagination, a special exhibit currently running at The Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, include early concept sketches from Fantasia and Snow White, personal letters, and a giant hologram of a mermaid. Overall the special exhibit is a success, but the most interesting piece on display isn’t by Disney, and it isn’t really by Dali, it is a virtual creation by a design house that sounds like an accounting firm (Goodby, Silverstein, & Partners), brought to life through everyone’s favorite new black box: The Oculus Rift.
Towards the end of the real gallery space, side rooms of personal correspondence and concept art are punctuated by an occasional masterpiece from the museum’s permanent collection, like Still Life Fast Moving. Behind a curtain, visitors can watch a portion of the Disney/Dali collaboration Destino. A collaboration that the two never actually finished, but based on the initial plans and script, Disney animators realized in 2003.
The connection between Dali and Disney may seem strange to those who know only the paintings of melting clocks of one, and the talking-mouse commercial empire of the other. Regardless of what one thinks of their politics and personal lives, there is no denying that both men were consummate visionaries, always looking to the create the next steps in their fields. Both men understood the power of myth and symbolism to an extent unrivaled by almost any other artistic figures in recent history (if ever), and both succeed time and again in modernizing mythology.
Oculus Rift graphics still don’t have amazing resolution, but Dreams of Dali is much better than earlier art based projects. Significantly, Dreams of Dali does more than just recreate existing art and art spaces. Dreams of Dali delivers more than a look at a painting, it let’s the visitor “live” in a painting. When the visitor straps on that Oculus helmet and the program fires up, a 2-D work of art (in this case Dali’s Archeological Reminiscence of Millet’s “Angelus”) becomes a world — a very limited world, but a world nonetheless.
Here’s What The Google Cultural Institute has on Millet’s Angelus:
HERE IS THE PROMO VIDEO FOR DREAMS OF DALI — AKA VR Angelus
In the Dreams of Dali experience, the visitor walks through the desert landscape and then proceeds towards a series of dots on the horizon. There are only a few branches on the visitor’s virtual path. The entire journey only hints at the possibility of more open-world developments in the future. The references to other Dali works are amusing, if slightly pedestrian. The eerie soundtrack and spoken words that echo through the headset are amazing and serve to truly immerse the participant. An inventive new way to experience a work of art, something rarely promised it is so difficult to actually deliver, But the Dali experience does deliver, even if it leaves the viewer wanting to do more, see more, and (at least, virtually) be more than currently available.
Disney and Dalí: Architects of the Imagination runs through June 12 at The Dali Museum — St. Petersburg, FL.
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