Planetariums As Platforms For Immersive Art

We’ve been looking to the sky for answers for quite some time now. Astronomical evidence has helped us to understand agriculture and to measure distances. In the Middle Ages, church domes pointed up to the infinite warning us not to play with the divine, as seen in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes. And then, in the 1920s, Carl Zeiss designed the first modern planetarium for the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Using new simulation and projection techniques, a system of lenses and mirrors transferred celestial images onto the inside of an auditorium, bringing viewers closer to experiencing the heavens than any observations with the naked eye had before.

The first images produced in domes used wide-angle lenses and 35mm and 70mm films, and the cost of production often prevented quick progress. More challenges arose because film formats like Omnimax didn't cover the entire surface of a planetarium, and images were only displayed properly if viewers stayed in the same position. Later, technicians adopted monochromatic vector graphics and projected images through fisheye lenses. Those trends are still seen today, through the use of multiple projectors like the Carl Zeiss Skymaster ZKP4 and its Spacegate projection system, which play animations in color.

Planetariums soon began to appeal to independent producers. As technology became less expensive and more mature, artists and researchers started to see the spaces as platforms for artistic endeavors, as the dome-shaped form in itself guarantees a total immersive experience that amplifies what it presents. Planetariums provide a home for scientific and educational projections, video art, real-time multimedia performances, and interactive installations. The Fulldome UK festival and the research center at the Arts Lab at the University of Mexico City have been exploring these ideas.

If the future of cinema will incorporate real-time production and interactive elements with the audience and the projection space, a planetarium seems to be the perfect place to display images in a more closed format, as the space offers a profound sphere of possibility. By incorporating interactive and narrative elements in games that feature the physical properties of planetariums, it's with that and some gaming elements that the German design studio IntoLight created the interactive installation iLand, shown below. They describe the project as:

“An interactive installation containing a projection that covers the entire inner surface of a geodesic dome with five projectors. It represents an island that floats among others in the vastness of the Internet and, like all other virtual islands, it needs to deal with spam, viruses, illegal downloads and attempts at censorship. Visitors take the role of iLanders, manipulating certain aspects of their world. In order to achieve this, we constructed five haptic interfaces: a firewall, a spam volcano with a rotating brush to clean the sky, a steering wheel for the virtual pirate data, and a voyeur trojan app controlled remotely. Each interaction has a different effect on the 360-degree projection.”

Even though the project was presented last year, we think it’s a prime example of the potential for this type of projection.