Royal Ontario Museum: Gentilhomme Realizes Interactive Beehive Experience

According to invidis.com, Gentilhomme, a multimedia studio headquartered in Montreal, created an interactive beehive installation as part of an exhibition at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). The exhibition, titled "Bees: A Story of Survival," ran from May 16 to October 18. ROM's program describes it as an interactive exposition of "120 million years of bee adaptation and survival, telling the epic tale of these incredible creatures and their relationship to us and the natural world." The ROM staged the exhibition with the support of Desjardins Financial Group.

The museum and Desjardins called upon Gentilhomme to create an extension of the exhibition: an interactive booth set up outside the building, inviting visitors to enter. Inside, digital display screens and floor-to-ceiling projectors recreated the interior of a beehive through continuous projection mapping. Cameras inside the honeycomb-shaped installation captured visitors' silhouettes and used them to transform the surrounding digital content in real time.

The screens displayed real-time, responsive digital particles. When a visitor stood in front of the displays, the cameras mapped their shape and the projected artwork split, swirled and flowed around that outline. From the visitors' perspective, their silhouettes became glowing honeycomb forms inside the hive, with bees swarming around them.

Gentilhomme said the goal was to surprise ROM visitors with something playful and shareable. Since the exhibition was intended to showcase cooperation and collective strength, the studio explained, "we designed a hive at human scale, its cells enveloping visitors in a space that feels both institutional and organic. Every visitor who steps inside shapes it, together, as one hive."