Digital Lab · Learning

White Cube — teaching installation art by letting you stand inside it.

A small 3D gallery in the browser with three exercises and a studio. This page covers what it teaches, why it's built this way, and how to use it with a class.

The teaching problem

Installation art is notoriously hard to teach from pictures. A photo of an installation picks one viewpoint, freezes one light condition and leaves out the visitor, and those are exactly the things the work is made of. Students learn the names (site-specific, immersive, participatory) without ever having had the experience the names describe.

A 3D scene can't replace a real room, but it can give back the parts a photo removes: you can move, the light can change, and what you see depends on where you stand. White Cube uses that to let learners have three basic experiences of installation art before they get the vocabulary for them.

Three ideas, three exercises

These three were chosen because each is a perceptual fact you can check with your own eyes, and each one surprises most people the first time. That matters for the method below. Questions of taste have no right answer to predict, but "what colour will the shadow be?" does. The exercises use the checkable side of art (how seeing works) as a way into the open side (what artists do with it).

Experience first, vocabulary after

John Dewey argued in Art as Experience (1934) that art lives in experience, not in the object on its own. White Cube follows that order strictly. No exercise starts with a term or an artist's name. You first walk, switch lamps and turn a sculpture. The word anamorphosis, Goethe's coloured shadows, and names like Felice Varini, James Turrell, Olafur Eliasson, Tim Noble & Sue Webster and Kumi Yamashita appear only in the debrief, once you already have the experience they name.

Predict → Observe → Explain, for perception

Each exercise uses the Predict–Observe–Explain sequence from science teaching (White & Gunstone), adapted for looking:

• Predict. One question before you start: "Red, green and blue lamps shine on a white wall. What will you see?" Most people choose "a muddy brown wall", because that's what mixing paint does. The prediction brings that paint-box intuition into the open.
• Observe. Your answer stays visible while you work. Feedback is mostly visual, because in art the evidence should be the image: the shadows change colour as you move the lamps.
• Explain. The debrief gives a one-line principle, a short explanation, then a "Look again" question, for example "where two shadows overlap, what colour is it?" Its answer is hidden, and the Keep looking button sends you back into the room to check. Looking is the activity, not reading.

Feedback that points without telling

• A warm/cold bar in the viewpoint exercise fills up as you approach the right spot. It turns a needle-in-a-haystack search into guided exploration, without saying where to go.
• Notes that react to what you're doing. "Two lamps: look at the colour of each shadow. Which lamp is missing from it?" or "All three lamps are on, but they stand almost in one place." The notes ask you to look again; they don't give the answer.
• Mistakes worth making. Turn the sculpture halfway round and the wall reads UOY: the edges line up but the word is mirrored. The game names the effect instead of treating it as a failure, because it's a small lesson about projection in its own right.
• Hints only after struggle. After 40 seconds a hint appears. In the first exercise it also reveals footprints on the floor at the viewpoint.

From understanding to making: the studio

After the three guided exercises, the studio removes the goals: the shadow sculpture, three lamps you can recolour and move, and a photo button. The sequence goes from perceiving to understanding to composing. The photo button is a deliberate small lesson too: installations usually survive only as documentation, and choosing the angle for that photo is itself an artistic decision.

Using it in a class

A 45-minute lesson, suitable from about age 11:

1. 10 min, projected: show exercise 2's prediction and let everyone vote by hand before touching anything. Then play it live. The jump from "brown" to "white with coloured shadows" usually gets an audible reaction.
2. 15 min, in pairs on laptops or tablets: exercises 1 and 3. Pairs work better than individuals, because one walks while the other directs: "left… no, back… there!"
3. 15 min, in the real room: repeat it with real things. Three phone torches behind red, green and blue cellophane on a white sheet of paper give coloured shadows. A desk lamp and a heap of pencil cases, scissors and staplers make a shadow sculpture. Tape on two walls and the floor, traced from a phone torch held at one spot, makes an anamorphosis.
4. 5 min: look at real installations together. The artists named in the debriefs are a good starting point, as is this site's own art archive of installations about perception, projected images and light.

Step 3 matters most. The digital room is a rehearsal; the point is to make students notice viewpoint, light and shadow in real space afterwards.

Under the hood

One HTML file plus a self-hosted copy of three.js r178 (MIT licence). No build step, no external requests, no tracking.

• The anamorphic painting is made the way artists often make them: a virtual projector stands at the viewpoint. A depth map rendered once from there tells a small shader which surfaces the projector can reach, so patches hidden behind pillars stay unpainted, exactly as in a real room. Each surface point is mapped into the viewer's picture plane, and the circle and square are drawn there.
• The coloured light is three ordinary spotlights with shadow maps and no tone mapping, so the colours add up to white instead of being washed out. The cyan, magenta and yellow are not painted in; they come from the light adding up.
• The shadow sculpture is a word drawn into a tiny canvas, turned into about 200 blocks (one per filled pixel), with each block pushed a random distance along one axis. Seen along that axis, every block hides behind its neighbour and the outline is exact; from anywhere else it's a heap. A seeded random generator keeps the heap the same for every visitor.

References

Bishop, C. (2005). Installation Art: A Critical History. London: Tate Publishing.
Dewey, J. (1934). Art as Experience. New York: Minton, Balch & Company.
Goethe, J. W. von (1810). Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours). Tübingen: Cotta.
O'Doherty, B. (1976/1986). Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. First published as essays in Artforum, 1976.
White, R. & Gunstone, R. (1992). Probing Understanding. London: Falmer Press. (Predict–Observe–Explain)
Holbein the Younger, H. (1533). The Ambassadors. National Gallery, London.

Support this — everything here is free.

R Donate via Revolut