The Whitney Museum of American Art: Refigured: Snake

The Whitney Museum of American Art partnered with WPP creative agency, Design Bridge and Partners, to create, design and host its inaugural immersive art experience, Refigured: A Virtual Conversation and Tour. The fully digital event, designed in collaboration with creative technology teams of Design Bridge and Partners based in Singapore, New York and São Paulo, is hosted on Mozilla Hubs. Design Bridge and Partners used the spirit of the Whitney as a metaphor to capture the essence of the building’s structure, philosophy and surrounding environment, creating a new plane of existence for the museum. The virtual space incorporates light, reflections and material cues from the real world, using asymmetrical forms and industrial structures to achieve a sculptural presence while embracing the limitless nature of the digital realm. The partnership with the Whitney is the next in a series of collaborations for Design Bridge and Partners’ Singapore creative technology team, led by Jessica Tan, Digital Creative Director, with clients looking at the next generation of digital experiences to engage audiences through the creative possibilities of Web 3.0. The design of the virtual space for the Whitney sets the scene for countless possibilities in which the audience can reimagine how we experience art without the constraints of physical space and being. Drawn from the Whitney’s collection and including video, animation, sculpture, and augmented reality, the works in Refigured reflect on interactions between digital and physical materiality. The exhibition brings together a group of artists—Morehshin Allahyari, American Artist, Zach Blas and Jemima Wyman, Auriea Harvey, and Rachel Rossin—who engage with the concept of “refiguring,” appropriating material forms and bodies to re-create and reinvent them. Refiguring becomes a process of imagining alternative worlds as a means for constructing identity. As part of the virtual immersive experience, Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art Experience at the Whitney, leads several artists in conversation, encouraging them to discuss their work, with visitors invited to watch a livestream of the event on Zoom and explore the artworks in the virtual event space following the conversation.