TWO VENUES WE KNOW WELL, NOW WITH ES DEVLIN
TWO VENUES WE KNOW WELL, NOW WITH ES DEVLIN
Two Es Devlin commissions opened in London this summer within days of each other, and we had the privilege of working on both.
At the National Portrait Gallery, visitors are becoming co-authors of a portrait that never stops changing. At V&A East Storehouse, a dancer moves through cycles of light and sound inside a structure built from towering plywood forms, in dialogue with a hundred-year-old painting. Both are new commissions by the artist Es Devlin. Both ask a version of the same question: what happens when an audience stops watching and starts appearing inside the work?
For The Story Engineers, both projects landed somewhere familiar. We already knew the National Portrait Gallery well before Es Devlin’s studio arrived: we delivered the digital interpretation across nine galleries during the Inspiring People redisplay, working inside a Grade I listed building with genuinely little room for hardware to show. Our relationship with the V&A runs longer still. Seventeen projects since 2012 and we joined V&A East Storehouse in 2022 as the experiential technology partner delivering its technical infrastructure, a role that now extends to the V&A East Museum too. The ideas for these two new commissions belonged entirely to the artist. Our job was knowing exactly what each building would and wouldn’t allow.
THE EVERYTHINGISTS, V&A EAST STOREHOUSE
The Everythingists responds to Natalia Goncharova’s 1926 painted backcloth for The Firebird, suspending a dancer between towering forms that echo both shipping crates and the Storehouse’s own storage racking. Every ninety seconds, the piece resolves: light shifts across the structure, and Devlin’s recorded voice moves through a soundtrack built around Stravinsky’s original horn theme. It runs until 18 October 2026, as part of the Storehouse’s New Work programme.
Our role was to make that ninety-second cycle dependable, day after day. We engineered the control and playback systems that keep light, sound and voice in step, and placed directional speakers behind the sculpture itself so the soundtrack moves with the piece rather than sitting somewhere in the room. Before any of it reached the museum floor, we tested the full system at Es Devlin’s studio. On site, we worked through the practical constraints first (lift dimensions, rigging heights, what could physically reach the space) because we already understood the Storehouse’s own technical backbone well enough to know where this new piece needed to sit inside it.
A NATIONAL PORTRAIT, NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY
A National Portrait is the result of three years of collaboration between Devlin and Google Arts & Culture Lab. Visitors anywhere in the UK can upload a photograph, which is translated into an animated portrait in the style of Devlin’s own charcoal and chalk drawings, then added to a collective artwork displayed in the Gallery’s History Makers space. It runs until 27 October 2026, alongside drawing workshops led by the Gallery and, on one date, by Devlin herself.
We scoped and supplied the portrait displays and the media hardware running the software that turns each submission into a sketch on the gallery wall in real time, and tested the full chain at Es Devlin’s studio before install. The fit-out itself happened mostly outside opening hours, during early mornings and evenings, timed so the Gallery never had to close a room to fit us in. That timing only worked because we’d spent the best part of a year inside those same galleries before, and knew which walls could carry new hardware and which couldn’t.
Both commissions arrived to us already shaped by an artist working through her own process. What we added was the part that doesn’t show: systems tested and re-tested before an audience ever saw them, and enough working knowledge of two demanding buildings to fit new technology into them without anyone noticing the join. It’s also, if we’re honest, a reminder of what that knowledge is actually worth. We’d rather be in the room while a commission is still being drawn than arrive once it’s ready to install, and two buildings we know this well are as good a case as any for bringing us in earlier next time.
