Meta x Murakami at The Broad

Drawing from Mr. Murakami’s catalog of expressive characters, these AR installations marry his vision with the architecture and ethos of The Broad. But the goal was not to simply add virtual sculptures for some extra razzle dazzle. The AR activations serve as a guide for the journey visitors take through the museum — starting at the East-West Bank Plaza and flowing all the way through to the exhibition gallery space.

The effects are discoverable through custom activation vinyls onsite and used Meta Spark’s Multiplane Tracking capabilities for AR effects.

At the start of this collaboration, BUCK toured the museum with the Broad’s team to get an understanding of the journey that visitors take — where they arrive, where they queue for entrance, paths they walk in the lobby, and where they enter the special exhibition gallery. Armed with this information, we could plan where best to stage our activations.

Before entering The Broad, all visitors must queue up and walk through the Veil, a partition of The Broad’s iconic facade that drapes down, separated by a walkway between the lobby’s glass wall. There, visitors are entertained by large Ohana Flowers that bloom at the top of the Veil and smile down at visitors as they wait to enter.

The 3D Ohana Flowers were repurposed from the Mr. DOB effect, but six more color ways were added to make the Veil pop with technicolor variety.

The tightrope we walk on a job like this is how do we accentuate Mr. Murakami’s work through placement and context without imbuing them with new meaning? This is a harder line to walk than one might think. When work gets recontextualized, there are inevitably new meanings that can be drawn out. We were mindful to maintain that balance — ensuring that what we did through our AR effects only accentuated his work.

Thankfully, we were never working in a vacuum. This was a true collaboration between the curators at The Broad and BUCK. With every piece and its considered placement, there were conversations about the meaning of the art, the theme of the exhibit and how best to communicate that with the public.

One of the nice things about AR is it allows museum curators to put on a bigger and more ambitious show than the budget might allow. Mr. Murakami’s giant-sized Demon sculptures (Embodiment of ‘A’ and Embodiment of ‘Um’) debuted at the same show where the titular painting, Standing on the Tail of a Rainbow went on display so including them in The Broad exhibit made sense. But they were traveling at the time so it was not possible to physically ship them to Los Angeles in time. By building them in AR, Mr. Murakami and The Broad did not have to compromise their vision.

IRL, the sculptures stand at an imposing 14' tall. Ed Schad, The Broad’s curator, wanted the AR versions to ‘stand guard’ in the lobby with a similar, looming effect, but this presented unexpected challenges. First, it was difficult to designate enough floor space for them in a way that wouldn’t affect the flow of crowds through the lobby. Second, the illusion of presence, and correctly representing occlusion on visitors’ devices (e.g. when a person walked “in front” of one of the sculptures), was only possible with the latest generation of smartphones.

We arrived at the idea to ‘carve’ giant, virtual negative voids into the walls of the lobby itself to house the demons, which felt like the proper home for these modern-day interpretations of Nio (temple guards). These alcoves solved three problems in one stroke: they didn’t create bottlenecks with foot traffic; ensured the sculptures could be viewed on a wider band of devices; and alleviated performance issues by reducing the visible parts of the sculptures that needed to be rendered.