Dr Frederick Baker's virtual reality experience "Klimt's Magic Garden" recreates Gustav Klimt's Stoclet frieze as a digital landscape.
Dr Frederick Baker, Research Affiliate at the Centre for Film Studies and CRA at Wolfson College, has been awarded the Silver Medal for Cinematic Virtual Reality at the European Virtual Reality Halo Awards in Amsterdam. VR is a new and burgeoning field and Amsterdam has taken a leading worldwide role, with other winners coming from across the globe. The work was created in dialogue with art historians at the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) in Vienna, which owns the cartoon that the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt painted for the Villa Stoclet in Brussels in 1909. The VR work has been on display in the same museum gallery as the original for eight months. The research challenge was to create a remodelling of the 2D original into a 360 degree interactive Virtual Reality experience using an Unreal Engine software developed for gaming, and yet remain true to the spirit of the source work. Everything the viewer sees originally comes from Klimt, yet all of it has been given depth, movement, and natural lighting. Using HTC Vive technology, users can explore "Klimt's Magic Garden" and interact with the natural and symbolic motives that Klimt painted, in a digital spatial narrative structure that reflects the themes of expectation and fulfillment Klimt explored in his masterpeice. The work was commissioned by the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) and created with the 3D Graphic Artist Markus Cermak (Leiss Postproduction). The soundscape was composed by George Taylor.
