on walking into paintings, what a concept!
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I went to the Dali: Cybernetics immersive experience in London recently, after I’d enjoyed the Van Gogh version round the corner in February. The Dali one is at The Boiler House, which is part of the old Truman Brewery.
Here’s a little sizzle reel for Dali (yeah yeah okay it’s just a TikTok):
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I couldn’t even get the best bit in - the VR room at the end - I’ll come back to that.
Here’s Van Gogh, whose work is more beautiful, and whose life story is more familiar to me:
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Van Gogh’s was a short life - born in 1853, he died at 37, in 1890 - and he’s defined by the ear incident. I hadn’t really thought about how long Dali’s long, long life was (1904-89), and all the connections he had to important figures of the 20th century. The first room in the experience, with its two timeline wall hangings getting you up to speed, is simple, but kind of absorbing.
From there on, I looked forward to the room where the paintings would be tranformed into light shows, sweeping over blank white walls and floors and our faces, just as they do in the Van Gogh experience. Those spaces are incredible to sit in, make great fodder for online videos and they always make me try to imagine what this empty former workplace I’m in used to be like (the Van Gogh experience occupies a former stable building).
That thought stays with me as I lounge on a bean bag and watch Van Gogh’s many iterations of sunflowers, or Dali’s elephant-swans strut and melting pocket watches spin and dance, and, in a quieter moment, a girl standing at a window in a painting I’d not seen before. We experience the paintings on a huge scale, looking up in awe.
What does it mean to turn a space that was once for manual labour into art (not just art, but art transformed into experiences that we can physically interact with)? Especially those former places of labour that are now prime real estate, in an area that still has more gentrification to go: Spitalfields?
Just a couple of pretty Victorian streets over (mind the Jack the Ripper tour coming through), a cobbled lane built on layers of history, Brick Lane, is reaching the end of an era. The Bangladeshi curry houses where my uni mates and I would go a couple of times a month in our 20s might well be on borrowed time, and that breaks my heart:
At its height in the mid-2000s, Banglatown was home to around 60 Bangladeshi or Pakistani-owned curry restaurants and cafés. In February 2020, there were only 23 such outlets on Brick Lane and Osborn Street – a decrease of 62% in 15 years.
We were back, most of that gang, at our favourite one, Monsoon, last night, for a birthday. It was heaving. I sat opposite a friend who didn’t grow up in this country, and wasn’t that familiar with Brick Lane curry houses. He didn’t meet us until late in our group’s twice-monthly drunken curry house-quiz days, or maybe just after. He’d been for a high-end Indian meal in Marylebone the night before, but the rules are so different in a Brick Lane curry house. It’s more like a pub.
It was utterly delightful to see him take in the rules of the curry house in real time. From watching the moment outside when the birthday boy did his favourite thing of cutting a deal with the guy on the door (free round of drinks, free poppadoms and dips), to asking for some help with the endless menu, to watching our mate get involved in a conversation while walking past a man from another table, the two of them standing and talking and making us wonder if they were somehow acquaintances (they were not) - this wasn’t the kind of experience he’d had in a London restaurant before.
We were sat in the same upstairs room that we used to hire out and run a quiz in a couple of times a month, our friends and their friends and workmates and flatmates having brought their own booze from the shop opposite, now squeezing far too many people on to a table and karate-chopping the pops (oh, the shrapnel) and asking for more mango chutney (always).
We’re getting back to the Dali VR, I promise.
On the one hand, you can say that everything in this city is changing all the time, and the curry houses were built on the rubble of what went before. That’s true; but the speed it goes at! I’m currently facing a London flat move (pray for me), and nothing brings home the sheer velocity of gentrification in this city like figuring out where you can live, now, compared to 2, 5, 10, 20 years ago, to the place on the north-east edge of Zone 6 London where I’m from. It’s my hometown, but it keeps reminding me that I don’t get to hold on to anything here for very long - at least, not in the form it first appeared to me.
Back to the immersive stuff. At the end of the Van Gogh exhibition, they kind of sprung the VR stuff on us, for an extra charge, and I wasn’t that bothered about VR, so I declined. The VR room is included in the Dali one - and wow, it’s incredible! That room made me want to go back and try the Van Gogh one.
Once the heavy headset is on and you walk into the VR space, all you can see is floating old-timey helmets with numbers - the other visitors. You raise your hands because you can’t see them, and suddenly the appear, bronze and copper and rusted like a decayed metal statue, or like you’re in an old-timey diving suit. You’re on a ship, sailing into Dali’s most famous paintings. It’s some of the best 10-ish minutes I’ve ever spent. I don’t want to give too much about it away, but here’s a review if you’d like to read more.
We expect to be able to step into paintings now, to see them dance and flicker and slide off old stable or brewery walls as we watch. We’re given that power of art, just as we’re at our most powerless outside in the city, watching families leave and schools close and mortgages and rents spiral upwards and the gates closing on Primrose Hill at night. I wonder if I should be leaving too, and that’s complicating the flat hunt.
The Dali experience was such a lovely respite from all that stuff swimming around in my head, for 90 minutes. Time well spent in an old stable and a former brewery, exploring a virtual reality based on Dali’s unforgettable work, which doesn’t seem to have aged at all, unlike me and all the places round there that I used to know.
Good links:
I’m fascinated by afterlives on the internet:
Catriona Innes’ lovely Substack about grief, which I’ve had the chance to write for:
For my fellow Succession-heads, reading Hunter Harris is non-negotiable (spoilers if you’ve not watched S4 E8):
A few weeks ago, I was giving my friend and frequent poster / flyer designer Natalie Barbara some tips on setting up a TikTok for her new clothing brand, Natural Acid. I think this one shows that the pupil has truly outmastered the m̶a̶s̶t̶e̶r̶ I mean, friend who just got to the app a little earlier. Behold (the adorable dog is called Ruby):
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