van Gogh Light Shows: A Roundtable

If you live in or have visited a major city over the past year, chances are you've come across some version of the various new "immersive" "Van Gogh" "experiences." Staged by for-profit companies and marketed heavily on Facebook, these "environments" promise to bring audiences closer to the beloved paintings of Vincent Van Gogh through the magic of digital enlargement, animation, and projection. 

In this episode, Sarah and Tina are joined by Swagato Chakravorty, a fellow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art whose doctoral work in art history and film and media studies focused on the history of screens. Together, they attempt to get to the bottom of just what makes these experiences so appealing to audiences, and how we might think about them as aspects of visual culture related to ideas in art history, instead of just dismissing them as unsatisfying reproductions outright.

LINKS

To find a local immersive Van Gogh experience near you, visit: 
Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience; Immersive Van Gogh; Van Gogh Alive; Beyond Van Gogh; Imagine Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience

"Blow Up: Joseph Henry on immersive van Gogh," Artforum, August 11, 2021
Maya Phillips, "Paintings, Projections, V.R. Starry Nights: Can We Ever Know van Gogh?" New York Times, July 18, 2021
Ben Davis, "Two Immersive Van Gogh Experiences Offer the Post-Pandemic Escapism Visitors Crave. They Have Weirdly Little to Do With Van Gogh," Artnet, June 24, 2021
Filippo Lorenzin, "Considering Immersive Art Rooms and Why We Love to Escape," Hyperallergic, August 22, 2021