Digital Gallery

A digital gallery in Paris is making art an immersive experience for visitors who can walk into and over paintings projected around a warehouse. The establishment is a vestige of the 19th century, when the Chemin Vert area of the 11th arrondissement was rife with industry. Forget the sound-and-light shows of yesteryear. Atelier des Lumières is a high-tech immersion into an artistic world, transforming the cavernous industrial space— dotted with historic features including metalwork, a chimney and pool— into a colorful canvas.

The Atelier des Lumieres, or Studio of Lights, opened with an inaugural exhibit featuring Austrian painter Gustav Klimt’s work not hanging on walls, but lighting up floors, ceilings and walls in a colorful, 35-minute moving sequence.

Gallery director Michael Couzigou says: “We use photos scanned in high definition to make this digital exhibition a universe of music and sound.” The show, set to classical music, attracted 60,000 visitors in its first 10 days.

Organisers say the gallery is the biggest of its kind in the world. It has 140 fixed video projectors installed across the 3300-square-metre space.