The opening of the sprawling Zaha Hadid-designed Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, which will soon exhibit slices of L.A.-based billionaire Eli Broad’s extensive art collection, has been postponed from this spring to the fall for reasons only vaguely stated. But never fear; for those of you chomping at the bit to see it, or who are in a particularly remote part of the world in relation to East Lansing, Michigan, MSU has just opened the Virtual Broad Art Museum.
"What I really wanted to do is get a museum up as quickly as I could,” museum director Michael Rush told ARTINFO, “but a museum that announced our internationalism and desire to participate in the 21st century. I thought the best way to do that would be to initate a digital experience that would be available worldwide and would involve multiple users and would reflect the building of the real building but in a virtual world." And so, Rush commissioned new media artists John Fillwalk and Adam Brown to create the Virtual Broad Art Museum project for visitors to tour with custom avatars (one of which appears to be a floating red cube). The interior designs came directly from renderings of Hadid's architecture, while the exterior environment is based on live weather reports from East Lansing.
Rather than create a copy of the museum, however, Rush aimed to create a virtual space with a life of its own. With its eerie soundtrack and brightly-colored geometric shapes and artworks floating past, the museum seemed to us at times more like an acid trip gone awry than a visit to an art museum, although we're not complaining. In the future, the Virtual Broad will have its own schedule of programming independent from the actual museum, complete with performance art and lectures, and it will never charge admission.
"There's going to be an exquisitive corpose aspect to it," Rush added. "People around the world entering this environment will be making performances with other avatars that are there, adding on and substracting from what’s present in the digital world. I don’t see this as just mimicking what happens in the real world. The vocabulary, the feeling, and the action required will all be particular to the digital arenas." One of the neatest parts: you can interact with fellow virtual museum-goers from around the world through the chat features, making this a perfect opportunity to try out our art world pickup lines. Check out the simulation below.