For Brian’s birthday I made reservations at our favorite Honolulu restaurant for sunset (we’ve only been to three Honolulu restaurants… so that isn’t saying too much). I also wanted to go see what this Van Gogh Immersive Experience was all about. I think it’s the first real event since COVID. So we scheduled that at 3:15pm and then made a slow walk to the restaurant. Tickets were ~$40 each, we had a military rate for that.

Overall, I would do it again but at a different time with less crowds. It starts off kinda slow and museum-y. You start by walking into a big room with standing “powerpoint slides” which talk a bit about his life, make some big assumptions about his artwork and essence, and have some cool hanging frames. (I’ll compare a couple “slides” to high school english when you go to class and the teacher says “the carpet was red in that room to signify power” and really for all we know the carpet was red because the author liked red. But who am I to say how much these people studied Van Gogh?)

The color and art behind the slides was beautiful. There is beautiful classical-y music playing in the background. Next, you walk into another big room which is projecting colors on the wall that start at the top and flow down. That is a door to the left the colors get “hung” on.

Finally you get to what I consider the real “immersive” part. You walk into an even bigger room with a ton of people. A “presentation” plays for about an hour cycling through different aspects of his work. Portraits, landscapes, flowers, etc. There are projectors projecting onto the walls and floors.

They incorporate a lot motion, above the writing was being written in real time, and here the stars are actually twinkling.

In the above portraits of himself, some of them blink.

The transitions were wicked cool Here you can see the house scenery getting colored. It happens really slowly.

And this turned from a static picture of flowers on tree branches with lots of that teal blue background to completely raining pedals.

You can tell how packed it was because I hardly got any pictures without anybody. When we had entered the room, we saw the signatures showing up (which made it a bit confusing). But then the rest of it started playing. When the signatures showed up again we knew it had cycled and made our way out. So did everyone, so I got a pretty clean picture.

There was a group of 5 families who came together that happened to be in there with us… all with kids no older than 7. It happened to be pretty distracting. I am all for bringing kids to experiences, but maybe not in a posse of 15?

I didn’t get bored at all watching it, it was really well paced. Would recommend going on off peak hours. It was really impressive the work they did to add motion and flow and get all the projectors synced. I’m glad we went.