The Visionary Collection
Christie’s New York — Paul G. Allen Collection
-
Creative Direction: Andy Moliski
Content: Madeleine Osborne, Hillary Cleary
Development: Katie Han, Weili Shi, Ben Bojko
Project Management: Katie Lannigan
Fabrication: ChemCreative
In a single evening, Microsoft cofounder Paul G. Allen’s ‘Visionary Collection’ achieved over $1.5 billion at auction, making it the largest and most exceptional sale in art auction history. Christie’s New York brought on Bluecadet to create a pre-auction interactive introduction to the gallery fitting for a truly visionary body of artwork spanning nearly 500 years of art history.
View a virtual tour of the full gallery here.
Project type: Media + spatial install
The Visionary Collection
Late Microsoft cofounder Paul G. Allen passionately collected over 150 masterpieces over the course of his lifetime spanning nearly 500 years of art history from Botticelli to Georgia O’Keefe. The collection paints an intriguing landscape of some of art’s greatest innovators curated by a man who dedicated his life to technological innovation. What can an extensive personal collection tell us about the collector? What can we learn from such a broadly curated body of visionary artwork?
David Hockney’s ‘Winter Timber’ in the pre-auction temporary gallery at Christie’s, New York.
Creating a space between art and technology
The Paul Allen collection presented the perfect opportunity for Christie’s to build their first interactive experience for a temporary gallery. It seemed fitting to use an immersive digital space to connect the artworks to Paul Allen’s interest in technical innovation.
The interactive space would seek to balance passive immersion with deep editorial exploitability.
We were lucky enough to utilize super resolution scans of over 150 masterpieces.
The artwork coordinates between a full canvas 14.7’x8.2’ LED wall and four enlarged crops of the artwork on 55” touchscreens.
A timelapse showing the environmental changes based on the selected artwork.
All four of the 55” touchscreens can be activated to reveal an explorable timeline of all 150 artworks in the collection.
Each artwork can be enlarged through gestures.
Several curatory filters group the collection through Paul Allen’s eyes.
