Unframed Collection is a partner of Numix Lab, a touring event in Europe that every year brings together professionals and experts in immersive creation to meet the cultural centres of the host countries. In 2024, Germany welcomed 250 people, with an intense week of exchanges and discoveries between Munich, Leipzig and Berlin! To mark the occasion, we met Philippe Rivière, Director of Digital for the Art Explora Foundation in France, a non-profit foundation set up five years ago.
Now a key player in cultural dissemination in France and Europe, with a strong educational dimension, Art Explora has had a busy year, with the deployment of a travelling festival (of digital art and VR) on board a sailing boat in the Mediterranean, and many other travelling events to share culture even more widely with all kinds of audiences.
Art Explora on land and at sea: art on the move
Art Explora does not currently manage fixed venues, but is working on mobile systems, such as museum lorries transporting exhibitions. We have a long-term partnership with the Centre Pompidou, and another lorry that travels with the collections of the various regional contemporary art funds (FRAC).
We are also organising exhibitions in England, in partnership with the Tate Modern. Our concept is really based on exhibitions produced in close association with the curators of the venues concerned. We’re targeting small towns that don’t really have a permanent cultural offering. We set up real ephemeral exhibition spaces there, for example to welcome whole classes during the week, primary school children (aged nine to twelve) who can then come back with their parents, brothers and sisters, etc. And at the weekend, it’s open days for anyone who wants to come along.
These are tried and tested systems that work very well. We are developing new tours with new partners, to be continued… And now there’s another travelling event in the Mediterranean, our Art Explora Festival, which is organised around a museum boat and a cultural village that we set up in a port with a programme of live shows to showcase the local scene each time. It’s really entrusted to local curators to really work locally, with different artists at each stage.
This boat is a real on-board immersion concept, with sound immersion like a postcard of the Mediterranean produced with IRCAM amplify. On the main deck, we have a digital exhibition we produced with the Louvre Museum, Présentes, which deals with the representation of women in Mediterranean cultures.
The tour began in spring 2024, with these two formats. We start with a rather educational format, with a rather dynamic audiovisual aimed at everyone, giving the keys to understanding the theme of the works to be discovered. Visitors then enter the immersive room, a room completely covered in LEDs, which will work on the materiality of the works and lead to some really powerful confrontations. We’re playing with emotions. We were able to digitise more than fifty works in 3D directly in the Louvre Museum, with spatialized sound enveloping everything. We’re really playing with emotional inertia using content produced by the Louvre.
Horizon 2026: a project for a new venue in Saint Ouen
The reason I’m at Numix Lab this year is to meet venues, co-producers and creators on a European scale. That’s really the magic of this event, and of 20 countries coming together over the course of a week. In about two years’ time, Art Explora will open its first permanent venue in what is now the new Saint-Denis Pleyel station (the largest metro station in the Paris suburbs). The station is very close to Paris, particularly on the new line 14, and is very accessible. It opened this summer to coincide with the Olympic Games.
Above the metro station itself, there’s a beautiful 4-storey building representing around 5,000 square metres. We’re going to dedicate 70% of the space to immersive and visual arts, with collective immersive exhibition spaces, a product demonstration floor that serves as a permanent space, with programming that we imagine will change every three or four months, in addition to artist residencies – for artists who want to go digital. There will also be an incubator floor with a new media and artificial intelligence vision, to create a truly digital ecosystem within the next two years.
The evolution of immersive practices, towards the hybridity of works?
Projecting into the future is complex, but in two years’ time we can imagine an acceleration in innovation and the hybridity of formats. This means offering VR and projection based on the same content or in the same exhibition, with the possibility of evolving in different cinemas, all from the same creators or at the request of the same venues.
Everything is becoming more structured and the collaborations are diversifying enormously. Lots of people, institutions and venues want to discover all these worlds. We can’t go it alone, or only with difficulty. So it’s really through these international partnerships that we’re going to be able to offer stronger content, which can be offered in several different places, and above all take advantage of these content itineraries which, in the long run, enable us to get a decent return on investment compared with the basic investment, which is still substantial.
Art Explora: a look back at Numix Lab 2024
I’m lucky enough to have been involved in Numix Lab from the very first edition. I’ve seen the evolution of this event, which has gone from being something fairly Francophone with the Quebec and France side associated with it, to something very international, super European since last year and this edition in particular in Germany.
From what we see in Munich, or in Central Europe to go a little further afield, we really do have a multiplicity of very dynamic European players. From Malta to the Baltic States, for example. There’s something really interesting here. And the different formats offered by the Numix Labs, with very collective round tables in the morning, sessions with slightly more traditional presentations, and then every afternoon all these site visits, are really very conducive to exchanges. Each time we come back with lots of ideas, people to contact and work with, or to continue thinking about. It’s always a very interesting week.
