STOCKHOLM — Guests filed one after the other right into a darkish, 6 foot by 12 foot room on the House exhibition middle right here final Friday, the place they had been greeted by a mixture of ringing and muddled noises: digital camera clicks, viewers cheers, airplane engine roars. Strobe lights bounced off a ceiling-high display exhibiting the interiors of automobiles, paparazzi flashes and the reaching arms of a pageant crowd in fast succession. Jagged mirrors within the ceiling mirrored the chaos under.
The impact was meant to breed the bewildering expertise of being the wildly profitable, globe-trotting D.J. Avicii. For some guests, it made a huge impact. “I believe I might go loopy if I needed to dwell like that,” mentioned Magdalena Grundström, a 51-year-old classical musician.
Had entrants turned proper, they might have encountered a really totally different house. Via a beaded curtain, pan pipe music was taking part in within the neighboring room. On certainly one of its sea-green partitions, a textual content on hanging material defined how Buddhism may also help with nervousness.
These contrasting rooms are a part of the Avicii Expertise, a brand new immersive exhibition devoted to the lifetime of the Swedish digital dance music producer that opened in Stockholm in late February. The momentary museum is designed to provide guests an perception into each the musical abilities that introduced him world fame as an in-demand D.J., and the pressures that led as much as his suicide.
It additionally grapples with how you can memorialize a brief life formed by extraordinary public curiosity in a approach that feels each entertaining and considerate.
Avicii, born Tim Bergling, died whereas on trip in Muscat, Oman, in April 2018. Two years earlier, he had retired from touring, citing the overwhelming schedule of an internationally well-known D.J. He additionally struggled with alcohol and prescription painkillers.
Avicii was solely 22 years previous when “Ranges,” a hooky dance monitor that includes an Etta James pattern, propelled him to stardom. Over the next six years, his music took digital dance music, or E.D.M., in new instructions, mixing beats with folks vocals on tracks like “Wake Me Up” from his 2013 debut, “True.” He was nominated for 2 Grammys, and his songs have been streamed greater than a billion instances on Spotify.
After Avicii’s dying, his household visited Abba the Museum, an interactive, immersive house devoted to the Swedish pop group, additionally in Stockholm. They thought one thing comparable might work as a tribute to Avicii, Lisa Halling-Aadland, the content material producer of the Avicii Expertise, mentioned in a video interview.
“It’s clearly two very totally different feelings tied to every of those,” Halling-Aadland mentioned, “however we mentioned sure, we will do one thing. Not the identical, however one thing.”
Halling-Aadland and her mom, Ingmarie Halling, the exhibition’s artistic director, sought approval from the Bergling household all through the planning course of. “We simply needed to persistently flip to them. We had an concept that’s good for us, after which we mentioned, does this appear proper to you guys?” Halling-Aadland mentioned.
The Avicii Expertise, which can run for a number of years, is designed to emphasise the distinction between Tim Bergling, an introverted individual whose ardour was composing music, and Avicii, a world E.D.M. model.
“The traditional impression was maybe, a really profitable, wealthy man: Why did he finish his life the way in which he did?” Klas Bergling, the musician’s father, mentioned in a telephone interview. “I don’t imply that we now have a solution. By no means. However you get one other perspective.”
The exhibition features a duplicate of Avicii’s childhood bed room, full with a discarded pizza field and a pc display exhibiting his World of Warcraft character. Close by guests can don a digital actuality headset, enter a duplicate of his recording studio and sing the vocals on certainly one of his tracks.
The final 10 years have seen a growth in immersive experiences. Globally there are at present not less than 5 immersive Van Gogh exhibitions — Instagram-friendly exhibits which have attracted guests past the same old viewers for artwork galleries. In London, there have lately been immersive exhibits devoted to the work of David Bowie, Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones, and the theater firm Punchdrunk has been exploring immersive, interactive productions for the final decade.
It’s not stunning that as immersive experiences grow to be extra widespread, the themes they attempt to sort out will broaden too, mentioned Sarah Elger, the C.E.O. of an immersive experiences firm known as Pseudonym Productions.
However that doesn’t imply it’s straightforward to get it proper. “Designing an immersive expertise in and of itself is an artwork kind,” she mentioned in a latest video interview. For immersive memorial areas, Elger harassed the significance of a curator having a “private connection” with the topic. “Challenges will come up if this turns into a mainstay of how we need to memorialize folks,” she added.
In 2020, plans for an interactive, immersive Holocaust memorial expertise in Kyiv, Ukraine, ignited a firestorm of criticism, together with a rebuke from a curator who mentioned it could be “Holocaust Disney.”
The Avicii Expertise is billed as a “tribute” to the musician, and consists of areas that really feel funereal. The ultimate room within the present is small and churchlike, with white stone-effect partitions and flickering electrical candles in alcoves. A slide present of Avicii pictures is projected on one wall, whereas a solemn orchestral model of his hit “The Nights” performs. In a piece known as “Unanswered Questions,” a textual content explains that no one near Avicii noticed his suicide coming: “How might a human being be in the midst of such a artistic stream and instantly be gone?”
Priya Khanchandani, the curator of an exhibition about Amy Winehouse at London’s Design Museum that features immersive experiences, mentioned that the road between emotional engagement and leisure is a difficult one.
“It’s about sensitivity, and the immersive parts must be a part of the storytelling fairly than being a form of gimmicky car for sensory expertise in themselves,” she mentioned. “The hazard, after all, with these sorts of experiences is that they grow to be too client targeted. The museum turns into a theme park, or akin to a kind of retail expertise.”
Outdoors the Avicii Expertise, a store bought Avicii branded caps for 449 Swedish kronor, round $45. A part of the earnings from the Expertise go to the Tim Bergling Basis, a psychological well being charity arrange by Bergling’s household.
For Avicii followers, visiting the exhibition means shifting between the roles of client and mourner. Ayesha Simmons, 20, traveled from London to see the present. “That room with the jagged mirrors felt so vital to me, as a result of it gave us even the tiniest thought of what it should have felt like for him,” she mentioned in a Fb message.
The immersive parts didn’t impression everybody, although. “I simply thought I used to be in an amusement park,” Daniel Täng, 20, mentioned after strolling across the exhibition. “I didn’t actually give it some thought.”