Have you ever looked at a painting, at the animated people and scenery depicted, and wished you could live inside that world forever? Okay. maybe not forever, but to have that world that is forever frozen in time as an immersive art escape for you at any time you want! If you’ve ever had this wish or you’ve ever been curious as to what it would be like and wondered why technology hasn't contrived to make this happen, your wait is over. Starting this summer, you can now live inside the paintings of no lesser artist than Dutch impressionist Vincent Van Gogh.

Across fifty locations in the United States and Canada, the Immersive Van Gogh Experience is causing a frenzy. Since June, the exhibition shows have been happening in locations across 20 cities including New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Ottawa, Toronto, and Hawaii, with some of the shows being sold out well before they open or a location is announced. For some of these locations, the show has already been extended a few times into 2022.

Immersive Van Gogh, as part of the comprehensive Van Gogh experience, is presented by Lighthouse Immersive and Impact Museums, and it reflects a new trend of commercial experiential art experiences. This current trend can be traced from the King Tut mega-shows of past decades to the Yayoi Kusuma Infinity Rooms, which is both immersive and more art-oriented.

The Original Immersive Van Gogh Experience is a 3-D environment where you find yourselves in several of Van Gogh’s most celebrated paintings and led through a visual and theatrical experience. When you “step inside” the Impressionist works of Vincent van Gogh, thanks to 60,600 frames of video, 90,000,000 pixels, and 500,000+ cubic feet of animation projected onto the floor, ceiling, and walls, you will have the uncanny sensation of living inside these paintings. And for some select locations in New York City, San Fransisco, Chicago, Charlotte, and Toronto, you can participate in one of their yoga classes offered several days a week from now to September 5, 2021.

The 35-minute classes which will set you back by $55 per class are choreographed in harmony with the music, sounds, light, and moving images from Van Gogh's vast catalog of masterpieces. After the yoga sessions, participants have the option of strolling through the exhibit for another 25 minutes to further immerse themselves in the art.

Find below an analysis of the comprehensive Van Gogh experience shows on offer, as seen on ArtNet:

Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience is the vision of Mathieu St-Arnaud, creative director of Montreal-based Normal Studio, a projection-mapping outfit that has previously worked with the Montreal symphony and brought the Diary of Anne Frank to life. Beyond Van Gogh promises “300 of Vincent Van Gogh’s iconic artworks,” brought to life with music and “the artist’s own dreams, thoughts, and words.”

Imagine Van Gogh: The Immersive Exhibition claims to employ a signature technique of immersive projection so visceral that they do not show videos on their website because this would fail to capture the experience. Conceived by Annabelle Mauger and Julien Baron, associated with the immersive attraction known as the Cathédrale d’Images in France, Imagine Van Gogh is an animated projected collage of some 200 paintings from the final two years of Van Gogh’s life, all accompanied by classical hits by Saint-Saëns, Mozart, Bach, Delibes, and Satie. There is also a “pedagogical room,” conceived with art historian Androulla Michael.

Immersive Van Gogh is the brainchild of Italian film producer Massimiliano Siccardi. It promises, via 100 projectors, an hour-long experience completely bathing visitors in Vincent Van Gogh’s greatest hits, accompanied by “experimental electronic music with pure, ethereal and simple-seeming piano” by composer Luca Longobardi (for the New York incarnation, Hamilton production designer David Korins has been brought on for extra oomph). Siccardi and Longobardi are the team behind the Van Gogh, Starry Night experience at Paris’s L’Atelier des Lumières seen in the Netflix show Emily in Paris, if that’s important to you.

Van Gogh Alive comes courtesy Grande Experiences, also the braintrust behind such exhibitions as Monet & Friends and Planet Shark. Focusing on the period between 1880 and 1890, it promises “more than 3,000 Van Gogh images at enormous scale” via 40 projectors, augmented to show the Dutch artist’s sources of inspiration and set to “a powerful classical score.”

Finally, Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience, a partnership between producer Exhibition Hub and “entertainment discovery platform” Fever promises to wrap you in more than 400 Van Gogh works using a trademarked video mapping technology. On top of the light show, there is a drawing studio and galleries that offer info about Van Gogh’s life and work, and an (optional) 10-minute VR experience called A Day in the Life of the Artist in Arles.

Taking inspiration from this awesome, surreal immersive art experience, which African artist’s collection of works or a particular contemporary African painting on Aworanka would you love to have an immersive experience of?