A Review of the ISM Hexadome 360° Audiovisual Experience
Where did the technorati convene in San Francisco on July 25th, a Thursday night when most Millennials were at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, attending the performance of dance-club icon Robyn? They were on the edge of town in the Dogpatch, inside a repurposed warehouse along Pier 70, headquarters of the tech company Gusto, down the block from Juul, at the opening party of the Gray Area Festival, 2019.
The opening party was shrouded in mystery, nestled amongst the torn up streets and redeveloped lots east of 3rd Street, hidden behind the scaffolding that covered the brick and timber building facades of 20th Street. It was easy to get lost in the neighborhood and I saw many attendees on nearby street corners looking at their phone maps in confusion. My boyfriend finally found the event because a security guard caught us driving down the wrong street toward a construction site and redirected us.
I attended alone, after he dropped me off, not knowing if I’d make friends or see anyone I knew. I was looking forward to the main event, the Institute for Sound & Music’s Hexadome, transported from Berlin, characterized as, “a 360° audiovisual experience. The ISM Hexadome will showcase the work of world-renowned artists through spatialized sound and projected visuals in an enveloping, architectural space.” The doors opened at 8:00 p.m. and I arrived at 8:15, unsure who was checking tickets. The boundary between lobby and exhibit was extremely permeable, separated by large gaps between the pipe and drape, that any number of my friends could have joined me for this “sold out” event. After obtaining my festival pass, a rather elegant satin ribbon wristband, I proceeded through the exhibit, arranged in the lobby atrium of the remodeled warehouse, towards the drink table, where nearly everyone had queued while waiting for the exhibit to start.
I stopped to admire an augmented reality video display on 2 large monitors, each equipped with Kinect sensors, featuring whips of rainbow light (identical to the “Flurry” screensaver on Apple computers) placed in a live video feed of the congregated crowd. The technology isolated viewers in such a way that it looked like the lighting effect emanated from behind and around them in real time. The video quality was great, as was the “Flurry” effect, but the video masking was roughly pixelated and blocky. I wondered if I was supposed to admire this installation for its novelty or for its lack of refinement that screamed, “look ma, I made a thing!” I turned to the large windows framing the twilight sky and ventured out for fresh air.
It suddenly occurred to me, while everyone was distracted with drinking, that I should stake my claim for a spot in the Hexadome for a prime viewing experience. There were no chairs or other indications for how to enjoy the roughly 30 foot diameter exhibit, surrounded by 6 large projector screens, each about 12 feet square and arranged in a hexagonal shape, hence the term “hexadome.” There was no dome per se, as there was no covering overhead, just the steel lighting framework from which the exhibit was suspended, also hexagonally shaped. Judging by the size of the crowd, I figured they’d pack the center once an announcement was made to start, so there wouldn’t be much room to move around. A dozen like-minded people had already formed in the middle and I casually joined in.
After a few minutes passed, the MC took command of the mic, called everyone into the Hexadome, and made a few introductory statements about the event, sponsors, and the artists. Strangely, nothing was said that helped contextualize what we were about to experience. Should we sit on the floor, or stand? How many acts or scenes would be shown? How long were they? Was there an intermission? Was it best to move around? Where were the bathrooms? None of this was explained and suddenly after a brief false start because of a technical glitch, the audiovisual experience commenced.
I was excited by the ambient soundscape that swirled around us in 360º, as the exhibit promised. The 6 video screens lit up with a surreal and semi-abstract cosmic void, populated with geometric shapes, nebulous dust clouds, and spherical geodes rotating in the black void of space to reveal craters of brilliant colors. This was all very promising until somehow the standing crowd decided that the best way to experience this was to sit on the floor. Suddenly 250 people were seated cross-legged like kindergarteners. This is when my discontent started.
Needless to say, I did not want to sit down. Not because it was uncomfortable and not because claiming a few square inches of real estate was awkward amongst a couple hundred people. No, I did not want to sit down because I did not want to be forced to choose a single point of view. Sitting suddenly rooted me to a spot, one in which there was an experience in view and one out of view behind me. Being anchored to the floor made it incredibly difficult to turn and see the entire exhibit. What started as a 360º experience was reduced to a 270º experience at most, and a 180º experience at best. Suddenly I was forced to reconcile the consequences of my decision to be early and choose a spot in the middle. Though I might have had the best audio experience, a better visual experience would have been at the periphery where nearly all the screens could be in view.
The truth was, it didn’t really matter and that made me even more annoyed. It didn’t matter which screen I watched because there was no focal point. Though each screen was displaying something unique, they weren’t displaying radically different content. Each screen was projecting a variation of the same thing, the same geometric shapes, the same nebulous clouds, the same rotating geode, just with randomized parameters that made it appear unique. If no screen was the most important, then none of them were important. Each could be treated equally. So if each screen was equal, then why were we surrounded with ostensibly 360º of content when we really only needed to look at one screen?
Furthermore, there wasn’t always continuity between screens. If an animated object floated off of one screen to the left, it didn’t appear on the right side of its neighbor after traveling through the gap between projections. This made me wonder, why was I watching this screen? What content was I missing out on? Where was the focal point?
This leads me to the 360º audio. Yes, we were bathed in sound coming from all sides. That was pretty cool. The pulsing bass beat with synth melodies was familiar to me since I grew up on all manner of electronic music. However, in an age of immersive experiences, propelled by virtual reality (VR), I wondered why the sound was not directing my attention to a particular screen. I wondered why none of the videos illustrated the music, giving form to a sound, carrying an audible note visually from one canvas to the next as the sound panned from one speaker to the next. In VR, when the viewer has absolute freedom to view any part of the experience at any time, the artist must bring their attention back to a place where the action occurs, where the story is told, where the narrative will be developed, lest the viewer get lost in some minor environmental artwork and then realize they missed out on all of the fun. Isolated sound forces the viewer to turn and face it, but this exhibit did not. I started getting bored and a cramp developed in my leg.
Again, none of that was important since there was no narrative. There was no storyline, not even a discernible musical arc. The opening video did have a linear train of thought as the artwork animated in a descent from the cosmos, to the earth, and into technological forms of a geometric cityscape, before performing a rather cheap crossfade back to the cosmos again. But since there was no reason for me to view the exhibit from all angles, since I didn’t have to follow the suggestion of an anthropomorphic character or even a cartoon bouncing ball, it didn’t matter where I sat or what I looked at. The 360º experience was simply a prism of a unidirectional 60º cinema.
A truly immersive, multidimensional audiovisual experience that I have recently enjoyed is “The Visitors,” a 9-channel audio/video projection by Ragnar Kjartansson featured at both the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Broad in Los Angeles. One was free to wander the room of 8 large video projections, each featuring a unique point of view of the whole, the whole of which was perceptible simply by being in the room. The sound, the music, the visual textures, and the loose narrative was rather equally distributed, with some punctuated moments at certain screens, until directed to one screen towards the end. Because the exhibit featured video recordings of real people playing musical instruments (the content was not electronic in nature — the innovative technology was used in the recording and playback), it was filled with emotion and expression that was contagious, which pushed me to the point of tears.
The ISM Hexadome should be experienced similarly, with freedom of movement. As with most 360º experiences, the viewer should feel free to choose any point of view and to change that perspective with ease and spontaneity. If the artist chooses to direct their attention, then the artist should use audio-visual cues to do so, allowing the viewer to adapt to any changes in the exhibit at their own time. Something like the ISM Hexadome is best viewed with fewer people, so that occupying space is of no concern. Because the audio soundscape was ambient in nature with visuals that demanded no effort to follow in narrative, it is also best viewed as a backdrop to some other activity, either socializing, perhaps dancing, or simply experiencing as one wanders through this temple of technology. However, a ceremonial service in seated attention is not ideal for this type of installation, unless the artist chooses to comment on human obedience and supplication to the god of engineering.
