King’s and the National Gallery are working in partnership to explore how new technologies could transform arts and cultural spaces.
Working with Google Arts & Culture, National Gallery X (NGX) combines immersive technologies, including large-screen video, digital projection, audio, motion capture and virtual reality, with experimental technologies in development at King’s. The work tests technological inventions that could be embedded into cultural institutions in the future.
The collaboration draws on King’s strength across its faculties in museology – the study of museums – and the development and critique of creative media and their associated social, economic, health and cultural implications. Bringing together experts from across the capital, NGX builds on a rich and longstanding relationship between the National Gallery and King’s, which extends to Gallery experts teaching on courses within the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, coupled with both organisations’ strong commitment to creative, educational and curatorial expertise.
‘The NGX will draw on our creative collaborations at the intersection of culture, the digital creative industries and King’s research, allowing students and researchers to think differently and critically about art and the ways we access and engage with it,’ said Professor Evelyn Welch, Provost & Senior Vice President (Arts & Sciences).
NGX will host a series of residencies and short-term interventions from artists and thinkers to inform transformative cultural experiences over the next decade. One with art collective the Analema Group demonstrates how colours used in National Gallery works can be turned into sound. This draws on mathematical and technical research carried out by Professor Zoran Cvetkovic, Professor of Signal Processing, and Dr Ali Hossaini, Visiting Research Fellow, in the Department of Engineering.