Inside the Van Gogh Alive immersive art experience heading to Canberra's Parliamentary Triangle in March 2022

In a letter written to his brother, the artist credits this moment as his inspiration for one of the most famous artworks in history, The Starry Night.

At the time, Van Gogh was living at the Saint-Paul Asylum in the south of France, a place where he sought respite for his mental health issues. The artist would die a year later but it wouldn't be until after his death that he would start to gain recognition for his work, including his well-known pieces The Starry Night and Sunflowers.

It is not a revelation that Van Gogh never saw recognition for his work - more than a century after his death, the artist is still well-known as a caricature of the tortured and misunderstood artist. It's safe to say the artist would be shocked to see just how long-lasting his legacy has been.

But even if the artist had an audience during his lifetime, it would be near inconceivable for Van Gogh to imagine just how Canberrans will experience his works, The Starry Night, Sunflowers and The Cafe Terrace in 2022.

Van Gogh Alive heads to the capital next month, bringing with it a large-scale, multi-sensory experience that will see people immerse themselves inside Van Gogh's paintings.

Created by Grande Experiences, Van Gogh Alive uses the state-of-the-art SENSORY4 Gallery to project the artist's work using up to 40 high-definition projectors. These projections have been visited by more than 8 million people in more than 75 cities across the world. Where things differ from each of these presentations, however, are the additional immersive experiences that go along with them.

You don't just see the projections of Sunflowers on a wall, a room is transformed into field of sunflowers. You don't just see The Starry Night projected around you, there is a room where you experience gazing up at Van Gogh's night sky. And you don't just see The Cafe Terrace on a screen, you have coffee while sitting in a cafe inspired by the painting.

"It's an opportunity to engage with these artworks in a different mode that's not at all precious," designer Anna Cordingley says.

"The artwork is there, it's inferred, but it's intangible. And so there's not necessarily that stiff code of behaviour that you find in a regular art gallery when you're looking at a work worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It's an invitation to look at a known artwork in a new way."

Van Gogh Alive, and similar immersive art experiences, are the product of a world that revolves more and more around social media. It is designed for people to capture striking images with their phones, to then post on social media which then encourages more people to do the same.

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And these immersive art experiences are only getting more popular. While Van Gogh is - so far - the most popular immersive art experience, there are similar experiences for Frida Kahlo, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso and Gustav Klimt popping up around the world.

A 2020 HERE Institute report found that the immersive entertainment industry was valued at $US61.8 billion in 2019. And while COVID has since affected the industry, there is still a demand. Perhaps more so than ever.

Canberrans are lucky to share their city with institutions that regularly host some of the world's most prized artworks. It wasn't so long ago that people could see Van Gogh's Sunflowers in person. But for other cities that are not so lucky - or for Canberrans who haven't been able to see The Starry Night in person at New York's Museum of Modern Art, for example, during the pandemic - experiences such as Van Gogh Alive are a great option.

More than that, it's a way of presenting art to people who may not go to galleries. Or representing artworks in a new way for those who do go to galleries, in the hope they can see something new in these works. It's an informal way of presenting artwork that - if seen in person - would be reserved for a very formal setting. One filled with alarms and security guards that ensure you don't get too close.

But when put into the context of this custom 70-metre x 25-metre marquee - the largest touring showroom in the southern hemisphere - that rigid exclusivity is removed. Instead, it blurs the lines of the traditional art experience and entertainment, and because of that, it means people aren't intimidated to get too close.

And then there is just the scale of these pieces. There is no need to get up close and personal to the artwork when you are surrounded by large-scale projections of it, depicting all the fine details that would otherwise go unnoticed.

"What I always found amazing, even working on the designs, was with the video's immersiveness, you really flow into every single brushstroke," designer Richard Dinnen says.

"You can sit there and look at it, on these large light boxes that we've created, and you can see the canvas beyond the ink and the paint. I was walking around quite dazed and confused for a while, going 'You can see the canvas - look at it'. It's just those little things that if you take your time, you will soak in and enjoy."

In a way, Van Gogh Alive is more than an interpretation of the artist's work. Particularly when talking about the immersion rooms, it's art informing art.

Each room includes light, colour, sound and fragrance elements that have been inspired by Van Gogh's paintings. The Sunflower Room, for example, is a mirrored room complete with hundreds of sunflowers. And unlike other sunflower rooms elsewhere in the world, the Van Gogh Alive producers have also taken snippets of the sky from other Van Gogh paintings to place on a large lightbox hanging over the field of flowers. The result is not a realistic sunflower field, but rather one that would be at home in Van Gogh's world and only comes from creatives being able to run wild with ideas.

"We had the glorious invitation from Andrew Kay, our producer, to offer him a series of worlds that were going to blow his mind without tapping us in a pragmatic kind of budget sense," Cordingley says.

"It meant we could leap into these paintings and say 'Oh, well that Starry Night sky one, imagine if we took this element and extrapolated from it. What would it look like in 3D? What tones are we trying to set? What kind of scale are we talking about? How do we play with that?"

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