Hockney AR
Augmented Reality companion app for The Arrival of Spring exhibition
Client: David Hockney and Studio
Download: free for iPhone and iPad and Android
Exhibition: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020 (Royal Academy, 2021)
In short
Hockney AR is the free companion app to The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020. Point your phone at a page of the catalogue, or at a painting in the gallery, and the painting comes to life - replayed stroke by stroke as he made it, or as an animation made from it. Published by the studio; built by us.
Looking for the painting app he made the work in? That's Hockney Brushes - not publicly available, but if you're looking for it, tell us.
Left: the paintings the app looks for. Right: one of them playing out of the catalogue. App Store screenshots, © David Hockney, Inc.
Where it came from
In the spring of 2020, with the world locked down, David Hockney painted the season arriving around his house in Normandy on his iPad - 116 pictures between February and July, every one made in the app we built for him. A year later they were on the walls of the Royal Academy, and as the studio prepared the show and its catalogue they asked us for one more thing: a way for the paintings to move.
What it does
Hold your phone over a painting - on the page, or on the wall - and the app recognises it and plays it, in one of three ways:
- Replayed as he made it - every stroke, in the order he laid it down
- With weather - the same painting, with rain falling through it
- As an animation - a new moving piece made from the painting
It's marker-based: the app carries the paintings and recognises them by sight, so it works on the printed catalogue anywhere in the world and on the works hanging in the gallery, without a network or a QR code. The one thing we cared about most was that it should simply work - hold it up, see it happen - without any of the fiddling that put people off early AR.
How it connects to the painting app
The replays aren't videos we made afterwards. They come straight out of Hockney Brushes, which stores every stroke he made rather than the pixels, and can draw the painting again in the order it happened. Hockney AR takes those replays and anchors them to the printed page. Two years later the same replays, at a very different size, filled the four-storey walls of Lightroom.
Since
Hockney AR launched with the Royal Academy show in May 2021 and is still free on both stores. It works with the catalogue wherever the catalogue is, which is the point of it.
Artwork rights: David Hockney artworks shown for documentation of Reflex Arc’s project history only, © David Hockney / the David Hockney Foundation. No licensing available via Reflex Arc.
Interested in the painting app?
Not this one - this one you can download above. Hockney Brushes, the painting app he made the work in, was built for one artist, to his specifications, and it isn't publicly available. A lot of people arrive here looking for it, and we'd like to know how many. There's nothing to announce - but if you'd like to hear should that ever change, leave your email and, if you like, a line about what you'd use it for. We'll use it for nothing else.
The full story of the painting app, and everywhere the work made with it has been shown: The iPad painting app we built for David Hockney.
