SEE, HEAR, PLAY KANDINSKY!

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The innovative project by the Hamburg University of Music and Drama and the Hamburger Kunsthalle extends the experience of Wassily Kandinsky's painting White Dot into virtual reality

An innovative project by the Hamburg University of Music and Drama and the Hamburger Kunsthalle allows visitors to experience Wassily Kandinsky's 1923 painting White Dot (Composition 248) in a VR (virtual reality) environment. Until June 26, 2022 (from 11 am to 1 pm and from 2 pm to 5 pm), visitors to the Kunsthalle can "immerse" themselves in the painting with VR glasses and controllers in their hands as if in a three-dimensional space, move around in it and experience its elements as sounds at SEE, HEAR, PLAY KANDINSKY! Selected forms of the painting can be grasped interactively with the hands in the virtual space, moved and transformed into sounds. With this VR installation developed by multimedia composer Konstantina Orlandatou, the Hamburger Kunsthalle is expanding its already extensive digital offering and using virtual reality technology to convey a work of art for the first time.

The painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) saw himself as a synaesthete. He believed he could hear colors and see sounds and used this for his art theory, in which he combined colors and shapes with sounds: for example, yellow was a high tone and a pointed shape, such as a triangle. For him, blue corresponded most closely to a circle, the color red to a square. This combination of visual and acoustic spheres is reflected in the painting Weißer Punkt (Composition 248). For the virtual reality installation SEE, HEAR, PLAY KANDINSKY!, Konstantina Orlandatou (Hamburg University of Music and Drama, head of the Moving Sound Pictures project, funded by the federal-state Innovative University initiative) was inspired by Kandinsky and reinterpreted his work. She isolated triangles, squares, zigzag lines and other pictorial elements, arranged them in space and assigned them certain sounds and interactive properties. The VR installation thus offers users the opportunity to create an individual visual composition and experience its acoustic implementation.

With SEE, HEAR, PLAY KANDINSKY! the project partners Hochschule für Music and Drama Hamburg and Hamburger Kunsthalle show the connection between visual art and music in a new way. They combine analog and digital, real and virtual as complementary spheres: The virtual reality expands the experience of Kandinsky's painting, makes synaesthetic sensations tangible and has an effect on the perception of the original.

The VR installation is integrated into the permanent exhibition of the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Lichtwark Gallery) in the halls of Classical Modernism.

Project team:

Hamburg University of Music and Drama: Konstantina Orlandatou (Project Manager Moving Sound Pictures) and Christine Preuschl (Head of Transfer Office)

Hamburger Kunsthalle: Anja Gebauer (Research Associate for Digital Education), Katharina Hoins (Assistant to the Director), Karin Schick (Head of the Classical Modern Art Collection) and Andrea Weniger (Head of Education and Outreach)