Expanding Painting into Mixed Reality Environments

Over the past several days I have been transforming my studio into a growing mixed reality painting environment using virtual reality tools, spatial drawing systems, and immersive installation workflows.

What began as flat paintings, drawings, and sculptural experiments has evolved into volumetric spatial compositions that can now occupy entire architectural environments. Instead of treating painting as a static surface, I have been exploring what happens when painting expands outward into space and begins behaving more like installation, architecture, and environmental design.

The images are bit grainy.. why? They are screenshots taken directly from a screencast taken by my VR headset. The quality will soon change, as we know.

 

 

A major inspiration for this ongoing body of work is Kurt Schwitters and the Merzbau environments he developed throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Schwitters transformed his living and working environments into evolving sculptural systems where collage, architecture, and spatial composition merged into one continuous experience. In many ways, virtual reality and mixed reality technologies now allow contemporary artists to continue and expand these ideas into immersive digital space.

 

In these experiments, forms originally developed through drawing and painting are translated into spatial entities that float, stack, intersect, and respond to physical environments. The studio itself becomes part of the artwork. Walls, floors, ceilings, furniture, and movement through space all become active compositional elements.

One of the most exciting aspects of this process is the ability to work simultaneously between physical and virtual space using mixed reality passthrough systems. Rather than being fully isolated inside a virtual environment, passthrough mode allows me to see both the real studio and the virtual painting environment at the same time. This creates a hybrid workflow where physical architecture and digital mark-making merge into a single spatial composition process.

 

Technical Workflow / Spatial Computing Stack

This project was developed using the Meta Quest 3 headset together with Open Brush, an open-source virtual reality painting application originally derived from Google Tilt Brush.

Using the Meta Quest 3 passthrough mixed reality mode, I am able to paint directly into physical space while still seeing the architecture of the studio around me in real time. This allows digital forms to occupy actual environments rather than existing inside isolated VR simulations.

Check out the video below for a screen cast walk through the whole installation.

 

The workflow combines:

• painting
• sculpture
• installation thinking
• spatial computing
• embodied drawing
• immersive environment design
• mixed reality interaction

What interests me most is not simply the technology itself, but how these tools expand the language of painting and installation into new forms of spatial experience.

These experiments are also connected to larger future goals involving site-specific installations for galleries, museums, public spaces, airports, hotels, and immersive architectural environments where physical and digital systems coexist simultaneously.

The long-term vision is to develop spatial environments that function somewhere between painting, sculpture, architecture, and living digital systems.

So much more to come!