Grouek, a digital production company in Paris brought us a brief for a self-initiated project about creating a digital museum. From there we had carte-blanche to come up with the concept and design execution. We suggested creating a digital museum that would have a real architecture but that could be visited as if it were a video game. Artists can push the boundaries of what's physically feasible with out-of-scale projects, no gravity constraint, real multimedia installations, etc. The first exhibition “Popsculpture” is themed around the pop culture from the 60's till today. Imagine an eight-meter-high marble statue of Jay-z & Beyoncé, or an audio immersive experience in David Bowie's mind.
The virtual museum uses webgl technology, allowing the visitors to move through the space as if it were a video game but with a simple internet browser. The experience is immersive, from exploring the five-story building to discovering and interacting with the artwork, whether it is static, animated or interactive.
A crucial part of the project was the space itself. It had to be real, with a plausible and well-thought out architecture. Without the constraint of a physical building, needless to say the sky was the limit. We designed the space to host five floors, each floor representing a decade of pop-culture, from the 60s to the 2000s. Each floor has a number of sides equal to the decade it represents: the 60s floor is a hexagon, the 70s a heptagon and so on. The levels have high ceilings so that they can host out-of-scale pieces and the center of each floor is a massive skylight. See below how we designed the floors with both open and closed spaces.
For the visual identity of the project, we balanced the visual language with both antique elements (museum) and contemporary ones (digital museum). The use of this blue is in homage to Yves Klein’s blue with an added RGB vibrancy to represent the digital space the museum lives in.
2015