The Van Dyke Vanishments

Last weekend I went to Games Expo, East Kent, or GEEK as it’s more commonly known, in “London’s Famous Margate”. What drew me there was The Van Dyke Vanishments. Billed as an immersive experience through “art, theatre and gaming” how could I not go? With limited availability we snapped up the last tickets for Saturday and drove across to Margate after lunch. At the Turner contemporary, we had just enough time to scout round the Self exhibition gathering clues for the password that we’d need on our adventure, have a cup of tea while we tried to solve the anagram (the answer was sunflower, but I liked slower fun) the head off to the storefront of Endless Horizons Ltd, the art tourism company.

To be honest, they were a bit unprepared. Their TranspARTation machine was still at an experimental stage, so my son and I, and another family, had to sign extensive waivers before we were allowed into the lab. Which was empty. So we waited, but didn’t have that long to admire the photos of the frequent employee of the month winner before something came lumbering up the stairs…

Helmeted, with a mirrored visor and breathing apparatus,  the humanoid creature moved strangely about the lab as it … made a cup of tea. “It” had to take the helmet off to drink the tea of course, and we saw it was a young woman who introduced herself as Smith and after reciting the terms and conditions, led us down into the basement, and the machine…

Which wasn’t working. Of course, so we had to remind Smith of the password, witness the machine have an existential crisis and shut itself down, rewire it (using the handy artist/colour code we all learned at school – Klimt = yellow apparently), thump it  and literally deface two valuable self portraits (this one, and this one) before we got it working. Then the third painting took us (through quantum mechanics and a brightly painted tunnel) into the very mind of Anthony Van Dyke.

He was somewhat surprised to find us there.

Then Smith had the brilliant idea of getting the old master to restore the damaged portraits (which we’d had the presence of mind to bring with us). Of course he was disgusted by them – the scrawlings of children he said. So the answer was no. But Smith persisted, and suggested, that now the TranspARTation machine was working, she could open another quantum warp into the mind of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and we could all Van Dyke included explore the thinking behind his art. Tony (I don’t think he liked me calling him that) was intrigued enough to agree, and so we found ourselves in a cubist hell.

Van Dyke didn’t like it at all, but we found flat panels among the geometric shapes on the wall, and points to thread strings from, and together we built a 3D fish out of 2D shapes, giving Van D (and ourselves) a quick lesson in cubism. Then we were off through the Quantum Wormhole into the very white mind of Patrick Heron. There we constructed a deconstructed picture of St Ives, and in doing so, freed Van Dyke “from the tyranny of reality.”

Thus educated in the modern movement, he agreed to restore the paintings we’d defaced. All was well. Until we got Van Dyke’s own portrait back out of the TranspARTation machine, to find he’d become a Modernist a few hundred years too early…

Overall it was a great experience. My son enjoyed it, and the other family I was with get right into character as we helped Smith smooth over her mishaps. I felt I learned something do, which given I’ve already had four years of art history under my belt, suggests they managed not to dumb-down the learning while making it accessible. I could get pick about the details of Van Dykes clothes, and part of me of a bit disappointed in the “game” element of the experience – apart from solving a few puzzles, the ludic element ran “on rails” and was more of an immersive theatre experience.  But, there was a board-game version on offer, which sadly we didn’t get time to have a go with when we spent the next day at GEEK. There was a digital game version too, which I wasn’t even aware of that until after the event. I’ve found a beta version of it on-line, if you’d like to give it a go. It seems to use the same script, but of course the performances aren’t quite as good :)


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I came to cultural heritage via five years working at Midland Bank when I left school. In my free time, I volunteered as a costumed interpreter at Kentwell Hall and, with re-enactment societies, at various medieval sites around the UK and France. When, one evening, a few of us said “we could make a business out of this” I left my job at the bank to go to college, first to get an Art Foundation and then to Manchester Polytechnic to join an innovative course called Design for Communications Media. I specialised in Educational Media Design, with the intention of applying what I was learning to cultural heritage. During my vacations and upon graduation I worked for the nascent company my friends had started, Past Pleasures, creating immersive living history festivals at Lancaster and Tunbridge Wells, as well as projects including: an exhibition for the centenary of the Commonwealth Institute; a design for a metafictional Sherlock Holmes exhibition in Croydon; and, a game that combined real-time investment advice from 300 year-old characters at the Bank of England Museum with a digital simulation, tracking the players’ investment portfolio from the founding of the bank to its tercentenary. In 1996 I helped found JMD&Co, and for two years I also lectured on Heritage Tourism and Visitor Management and Interpretation modules for a Portsmouth University validated HND/degree course at Farnborough Technical College. Subsequently, I enrolled in the new Distance Learning delivered Masters’ degree in Museum Studies at Leicester University, where I became interested in the social use of space, particularly Bill Hillier’s “space syntax,” and the increasing futility of cultural heritage sites trying to tell doggedly linear stories in three-dimensional spaces. Although my dissertation explored models for mapping interpretation, and particularly learning styles, onto spaces, a satisfactory reconciliation of linear story and three-dimensional space eluded me. After graduation, I decided my time in the “small business” end of cultural heritage was over for a while, and I left JMD&Co to join a cultural institution, the National Trust, as a Regional Community, Learning and Volunteering Manager. I brought the first National Trust iPad into use at Batemans, where, combined with a wax cylinder record player, and the help of renowned folk singer, Jon Boden, we’ve returned Rudyard Kipling’s voice back into his old home. However, one of the innovations which I am most proud of is the National Trust’s virtual tours. Working with a small company, and a range of disabled stakeholders, we created a touch-screen based human computer interface that could also, if required, be controlled with other input devices, and allowed visitors with a variety of disabilities to fully enjoy the virtual tour. The teams’ achievement was recognised with a Jodi Award for Excellence in accessible digital media in 2008.

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