Stories brought to life: the National Portrait Gallery’s latest virtual reality venture is a triumph of immersive storytelling – The Art Newspaper

Stories—Brought to Life, a new experience created by the National Portrait Gallery and Frameless Creative, a leading London-based maker of immersive experiences, is a triumph of visual storytelling. It manages to bring together all the learnings of the art and technology worlds, and the experiential needs of their audiences, which have accrued since a new age of virtual reality was launched in 2014 when Facebook (now Meta) bought the headset maker Oculus Rift. It also nicely answers a challenge posed by The Art Newspaper last year.

In January 2024, The Art Newspaper published an analysis by the consultant Chris Michaels on immersive institutions: digital art venues that are attracting massive audiences with new forms of interactive experiences. The article asked how established museums could harness the evident public appetite for all-round digital spectacle produced by global companies such as teamLab and landmark sites like the Sphere in Las Vegas and Outernet in central London. And how art museums might partner with such institutions to reach new audiences. “For many museums,” Michaels wrote, “it is a question of when, not if, they engage.”

Annabelle Selldorf, architect of the remodelling of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing, told The Art Newspaper in December that she is “fascinated” by the access from the street of the five-sided video experience at Outernet, “because [it] is … so effective. Everybody stops.” Selldorf says she hopes that the new large digital screen in the Sainsbury Wing entrance, which opened in May, will help make it equally welcoming and reduce visitor anxiety at entering an historic gallery. “And,” she says, “make people curious in a different way.”

The National Portrait Gallery has caught the immersive wave in another way by partnering with Frameless to tell the story of figures, living and dead—from Queen Elizabeth I by way of Audrey Hepburn, Nelson Mandela, David Bowie and Ncuti Gatwa—drawing on the museum’s holdings. It is also a travelling experience, with its first stop at a temporary site in MediaCity in Manchester, and brings a London-based institution’s national collection to another city, with more sites to come.

Working with the museum’s visual archive and the leading production studio Cinesite, Ryan Atwood, creative director of Frameless Creative, has assembled a sequence of arresting, graphically sophisticated but accessible 150-second stories. The audience stands, or sits on benches, at the centre of a square space, part of a specially assembled 10,000 sq ft structure, and follows action across two of the four walls while the same action is mirrored on the facing walls (allowing dynamic animation without putting the audience through a neck-craning or head-spinning challenge).

The stories, static or moving across the space, are projected on to an irregular mosaic of square and oblong screens. This mosaic holds either individual images or fragments of larger ones, allowing for an arresting visual variety and change of pace. During the Winston Churchill segment, flights of Spitfires career across the walls, with surround audio in synch. Just one of many memorable stories brought to life.

• Stories—Brought to Life. Unframed, National Portrait Gallery and Frameless at The Piazza, MediaCity, Salford Quays, until 31 August