Tendril collaborated with AOI and CYPHER to create a high-fidelity immersive gallery experience for digital art collectors. Built in Unreal Engine, rendered in real-time on the cloud, and streamed via browser on any device, the gallery offers collectors, the public, and artists the ability to experience and showcase digital art, in a natively digital way.

There is an abundance of exceptionally crafted NFT/digital artwork out there and practically no fitting way to experience it. We took on the creative challenge to design and build something for the art and artists that we love. Our mandate was to explore how far we could push the quality of a real-time 3D online museum for digital art — a love-letter to the likes of Naoshima Island or Storm King. Try the full experience here.

Immersive Theatre

On launch, the immersive theatre of the gallery included a large scale collaborative artwork created by Tendril, titled Life#1. With sound design by CYPHER, this artwork is the first part of an ongoing exploration of the algorithms and processes that guide how living things grow and the forms they will take.

The project began with a simple prototype that we built in-house as an early proof of concept. We created a minimal, brutalist architectural space leading to a series of portals that load alternate levels in Unreal Engine and transport the user to different spaces.

Design Development

Conceptually, the gallery was designed to be as serene and immersive as possible: blending past and future, nature and architecture, interior and exterior. It’s a space that you can and want to spend time in, exploring and discovering little surprises around each corner (there are easter eggs to be discovered). As digital artists and creators, we are so excited to be able to provide a space for people to enjoy some of the most amazing digital art out there in a setting worthy of its craft and significance.

The generative, ambient music system was designed to produce ever evolving sonic experience within the hub and gallery spaces. Layers of ‘loops’ play in a random order based on sets of defined rules, generating a unique composition on each visit to the gallery. The daytime experience is in a major key, while the night mode is minor, shifting the mood slightly.

We also experimented with the concept of a modular gallery system that could be used by artists or collectors to easily build their own galleries and have them grow over time with their collections. Next steps will be to evolve this concept into a prototype for everyone 😉

Party Mode <3