CONTEXT:
Though the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, boasted the second-largest collection of Salvador Dalí’s work, it still lacked national appeal: its visitors mostly came from Florida. So the museum asked us to generate national awareness of its newest exhibition, Disney and Dalí: Architects of the Imagination, and to attract a broader range of visitors by reaching out to a national audience and to art lovers around the world. At the same time, the work had to continue to elevate the institution’s profile as an innovator in the art world and get younger audiences interested in Dalí’s work. Our budget was $150,000.
THE IDEA:
To launch the museum’s biggest exhibition of the year, we set out to do something that hadn’t been done before. We created Dreams of Dalí, a virtual-reality experience that was part of the museum’s then-running exhibition, Disney and Dalí: Architects of the Imagination, and that takes viewers inside the surrealist master’s mind. To do so, it invites them into one of his earlier paintings, The Archeological Reminiscence of Millet’s “Angelus.” For the first time, people could see a painting the way the painter himself saw it in his mind before the very first brush stroke. The VR installation takes visitors for a journey through a fully immersive digital world, a world in which they can move freely and explore the wonders of Dalí’s imagination. As they move around, they can hear his thoughts, find some of the famous creations that he would devise later in his career, and in the process, learn more about the life and work of the surrealist master. Dreams of Dalí is a new and more engaged way to look at art.
To bring Dalí’s world to life, we researched the artist’s work and the museum’s permanent collection. Many elements found in his paintings were recurring motifs across his work, so we used them to inform our 3-D models. We photographed The Archeological Reminiscence of Millet’s “Angelus” in medium format and worked with curators to ensure fidelity to the original. To re-create the towers, we looked at the materials and construction methods used in the area depicted in the artwork. Audio design included the artist’s voice, handpicked from videos in the museum’s archive and from YouTube. We also designed and constructed many of the solutions we implemented, such as proprietary coding and the navigation interface, the latter of which lets viewers move around by simply gazing at something.
RESULTS:
The exhibition Disney and Dalí: Architects of the Imagination, which Dreams of Dalí celebrated, ran from January 23 to June 12, and the data we’ve amassed shows that it had the most successful opening weekend in the museum’s history, with 26 percent more visitors than the previous best opening weekend. The five-minute online experience was also available as an interactive 3-D video both on YouTube and on Facebook and garnered over 2 million views without any media dollars. As a comparison, the museum receives 400,000 visitors every year. Dreams of Dalí yielded over 1.3 billion media impressions, worth over half a million dollars for the exhibition and the museum. Media coverage included the full range of categories: technology, art, advertising and traditional news publications (from the New York Times to WIRED to the Washington Post to Smithsonian magazine). Due to the great success, Dreams of Dalí is now in permanent exhibition at the museum and one of its main attractions.