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{"id":273014,"date":"2026-01-01T19:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-01-02T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/le-probleme-de-limmersion\/"},"modified":"2026-01-15T10:55:49","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T15:55:49","slug":"the-immersion-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/the-immersion-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"The Immersion Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We feel \u201cimmersive\u201d to be an adequate adjective when there\u2019s somehow a playful proposition for the visitor, when the audience\u2019s point of view is expected to change according to its own decisions, when there\u2019s a desire to blur the limits between the architectural environment and the artwork itself. Also, more lazily, when technology is involved, and more often than not, it\u2019s used as a vehicle for brand activation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It seems well established that we inherited \u201cimmersive\u201d from the vocabulary of the first wave of Californian digital culture in the early 1990s, along with neologisms such as \u201cvirtual reality\u201d (VR) and \u201ccyberspace.\u201d In the early issues of WIRED<\/em> magazine the term appears frequently as one of the defining features of emerging technologies such as CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment), one of the earliest room-sized projection infrastructures for stereoscopic images. Char Davies\u2019s Osmose<\/em> (1995), maybe the most renowned early VR project, embraced immersion as the defining characteristic and intention of the experience: as visitors put on a head-mounted display and a motion-tracking vest, they went from being mere members of an audience to actual \u201cimmersants.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Char Davies, \u201cOsmose,\u201d accessible online.<\/span> The recovery of the VR paradigm in 2013 with the launch of the first accessible and effective headset, the Oculus Rift, resuscitated the immersive as a seductive feature of these new and advanced forms of content delivery. But as early as 2002, media theorist Oliver Grau pointed out that immersion is not a ground-breaking capability emanating from unprecedented technologies but a perspective, a position, that can be ascribed to a lineage. In his classic book Virtual Art: From Illusion to <\/em>Immersion<\/em>,5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion<\/em>, trans. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).<\/span> Grau traces a genealogy of the immersive that places VR in the tradition of frescoes, landscape gardening, panoramas, and every expanded film technology from Cinerama and Sensorama to 3-D, Omnimax, and IMAX. Rather than dwelling on defining what immersive is or could be, we can do better by focusing on the aesthetic and political aspirations of immersion of today, and what it could be if immersion was relieved of its current articulation through specific industries and technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Char
Char Davies<\/strong>
Osmose (Tree Pond),<\/em> digital still, 1995.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

In articles and lectures over the last ten years, I have proposed the notion of a cultural logic of immersion that can be extended to include devices that exist in very different contexts, from experimental art practices to new interface technologies and pop culture (underground and mainstream). A general theory of immersion would have to range from Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller\u2019s binaural audio walks to Punchdrunk\u2019s scenographic architectures; from teamLab\u2019s digital evolving frescoes to Ragnar Kjartansson\u2019s multichannel, spatialized video installations. But it would also include forms such as full dome projection, spatial audio environments, VR art, and more. None of their specific attributes are necessarily unprecedented or unique. But together, they comprise enough of a shift to point to a transition towards a different cultural hegemony. The immersive has a grammar, an economy, and a sociology. Its grammar expresses a desire to contest the centrality and monotony of the single focal point in visual culture, represented best by the framed individual image.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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At a time when screens have become common enough to reside in everyone\u2019s pockets, the immersive demands a form of relation with the image that cannot be contained in a timeline or consumed in fifteen-second vertical video bits. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Many people watching a screen today are incapable of paying full attention to it, as they keep on checking their smartphone (a habit called \u201csecond screening\u201d). Immersion, counterintuitively, forces us to re-engage with our attention by introducing us into environments that require all of it. Immersion rejects the sacred, non-negotiable separation between work and spectator in visual culture, even in material terms\u200a\u2014\u200ain immersive rooms, you are frequently being projected over. If there is no frame to contain the screen, no uncrossable line between the stage and the audience, the centre of the field of view is no longer, by default, \u201cthe place where things happen.\u201d This is not a minor change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Rafael
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer<\/strong>
Field Atmosphonia<\/em>, 2020, installation view, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, 2023.
\u00a9 VEGAP, Madrid \/ CARCC, Ottawa, 2025
Photo: Zan Wimberley, courtesy of the artist
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Today, the economy of immersion is generally synonymous with one specific kind of artefact and one specific mode of commercial exploitation that has expanded globally very quickly in the last decade. This is the industry of the immersive exhibition, popularized by the output of agents such as the French entertainment company Culturespaces\u200a\u2014\u200acreator of the \u201cAtelier des Lumi\u00e8res\u201d model\u200a\u2014\u200aand the immensely successful Japanese artist collective teamLab. This form of immersive exhibition exists between the museum sector and the leisure and entertainment industry. It takes the template of the gallery visit and supercharges it with spectacle, monumental scale, and theme-park dynamics. In order to do this, it has developed a new kind of museographic device\u200a\u2014\u200anot the white cube or the black box but the immersive room, in which large-scale projections take over every surface surrounding the visitor. These have appeared in the hundreds in urban centres all over the world, a planetary leisure megastructure taking over old movie theatres, industrial spaces, and decaying shopping malls.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

In the commercial model that Culturespaces pioneered in 2012, Van Gogh, Monet, and Frida Kahlo are reduced to one more form of intellectual property (IP) that can be repurposed, rescaled, and updated, like Disney characters or Marvel superheroes. Freed from the constraints of their original physical canvases, works travel intangibly from city to city as digital files or are presented simultaneously in several places. Some contemporary blue-chip artists have been curious enough about this format to adapt their body of work for the immersive cube\u200a\u2014\u200amost notably David Hockney in his hour-long projected painting retrospective6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - \u201cDavid Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away<\/em>),\u201d Lightroom<\/em>, accessible online.<\/span> \u200a\u2014\u200abut it would be fair to say that in general, the art institution and the museum industry have not contemplated the emergence of this parallel circuit with great curiosity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a way of looking at the emergence of the immersive exhibition industry that would explain it as a response to new audiences\u2019 short attention spans and need for instant gratification. For the Instagram generation, the white cube is simply not dopamine-intensive enough, so it\u2019s easier to generate engagement and sell tickets if we produce a banal substitute for the real museum experience that is both more digestible and more spectacular. A lot of this is obviously true, but I think there is no discontinuity between what immersive shows are and what the \u201cbig museum\u201d visit, as consumer experience, had already become; in fact, the former is a practical solution for the shortcomings of the latter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"David
David Hockney<\/strong>
Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)<\/em>, exhibition view, Lightroom, London, 2023.
Photo: Justin Sutcliffe, courtesy of Lightroom, London<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Contemporary art museum visitors could already go to Tate Modern and join an endless queue to enter Yayoi Kusama\u2019s Infinity Mirror Rooms<\/em>, in order to take selfies inside for a maximum of two minutes per visitor, and then head to the Tate Modern Shop where they could choose from an infinite selection of Kusama merchandise\u200a\u2014\u200aKusama being an artist who at this point has become mostly a logo. Commodification, brandification, franchising, the logic of the blockbuster, artist as recognizable icon, gift-shop economy\u200a\u2014\u200aall of these have been innovations in the museum sector in the last three decades. Immersive shows are only perfecting them and providing a more efficient selfie infrastructure for the museum tourist and the experience economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The immersive sector may have culminated in a journey that was started by the blockbuster exhibition and the franchised museum, in which art becomes another technology for engagement, a supplier of memorable backgrounds for social media moments. If immersion can be banal, there\u2019s also a tendency to banalize it. Even though it lives at the centre of mainstream culture, it remains undertheorized. I believe it deserves to be taken more seriously, especially if we have any kind of interest in reclaiming the radicality of its foundational premise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOur intention is not to abolish the art of the past, however, nor to put a stop to life: we want painting to emerge from its frame and sculpture from its glass case.\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Lucio Fontana, quoted in Lucia Aspesi, Alessandro Cane, and Fiammetta Griccioli, Lucio Fontana: Ambienti\/Environments<\/em>, trans. Buysschaert&Malerba (Milan: Pirelli HangarBicocca, 2017), 10, accessible online.<\/span> The Second Manifesto of Spatialism <\/em>(1948) set the theoretical principles that would guide the development of Fontana\u2019s famous Ambienti Spaziali<\/em> (Spatial Environments) (1948\u201368). In these pieces Fontana used then-new materials such as neon lights and fluorescent paint, taking over empty rooms and corridors to produce intangible architectures that reconfigured human cognition\u200a\u2014\u200athree-dimensional paintings to walk through. The Ambienti <\/em>are often considered the predecessors to many things, from the Light and Space movement to Claes Oldenburg\u2019s performance environments. I feel traces of their DNA today in the output of creators working on the edges of perception, such as the artist Kurt Hentschl\u00e4ger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s been almost twenty years since I experienced Hentschl\u00e4ger\u2019s legendary piece FEED<\/em> at the S\u00f3nar Festival in Barcelona; it was originally shown at the Venice\u2019s Theatre Biennale in 2004 and is currently being presented in an updated version titled FEED.X<\/em> (2018). I remember, as much as the performance itself, the conversations that visitors had before agreeing to submit to it, and their recollections of having gone through it. It is not easy to explain FEED<\/em>, beyond using the clich\u00e9d description \u201can assault on the senses.\u201d After watching an enigmatic introductory digital film showcasing human bodies suspended in space, participants are submerged in a dense artificial fog that completely fills up the room, until vision is no longer possible. Then, rhythmic strobe lights and pulsating sounds take over until something eventually happens\u200a\u2014\u200anot in the space itself but in the visitors\u2019 neural systems. As the retina is bombarded with light and the visual cortex strains to see in the fog, the brain produces geometrical patterns and coloured vortexes that are clearly perceived by viewers. These events, called vision phosphenes, are the phenomena of perceiving light and colour without a light or colour source. No two people have the same experience of FEED<\/em> and no two people can exchange their own journey in the performance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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\"Kurt
Kurt Hentschl\u00e4ger<\/strong>
FEED.X<\/em>, 2018, installation view, Festival ELEKTRA, Usine C, Montr\u00e9al, 2019.
Photo: Gridspace, courtesy of the artist & ELEKTRA, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Hentschl\u00e4ger is not afraid of the unsettling and the claustrophobic, and his body of work definitely is not about confirming our expectations and providing comforting, familiar images that we can simply celebrate. Immersion, here, is a vehicle for challenging our shared position within our environment and the passive way in which we accept every signal and message that our senses are subjected to. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Kurt
Kurt Hentschl\u00e4ger<\/strong>
FEED,<\/em> installation view, La Biennale di Venezia Teatro, Venice, 2004.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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I think about this alternative program for the immersive and other pioneering projects that can perhaps be ascribed to the same lineage: Iannis Xenakis\u2019s Polytopes<\/em>, particularly his Beaubourg Diatope<\/em> for the opening of the Centre Pompidou in 1978; Marta Minuj\u00edn\u2019s original performative art environment, La Menesunda<\/em> (1965); Experiments in Art and Technology\u2019s reflective dome in the legendary Pepsi Pavilion at Expo 70. The list gets richer and more diverse as we probe the history of the art environment and its multiple incarnations. My long-time collaborator, the artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, has chosen to start using the tentative term \u201cinversive exhibition\u201d to break away from the baggage that \u201cimmersive\u201d carries today, and at the same time to reclaim and expand this alternative history. We started formulating this in Atmospheric Memory<\/em>, a large-scale art environment premiered at Manchester International Festival in 2019, and presented in an expanded version at Sydney\u2019s Powerhouse Museum in 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Rafael
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer<\/strong>
Recognition<\/em>, 2018; Cloud Display,<\/em> 2019, installation view, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, 2023.
\u00a9 VEGAP, Madrid \/ CARCC, Ottawa, 2025
Photo: Marinko Kojdanovski, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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he computer pioneer Charles Babbage suggested that the air surrounding us is a \u201cvast library\u201d containing every sound, every motion, and every word spoken. Atmospheric Memory<\/em> tests this idea by producing a monumental-scale laboratory dedicated to observing, capturing, and translating into visual and sonic patterns a simple act that defines the human species: the moment in which the air coming from our lungs leaves our larynx, which is modelled by our vocal tract and exits through our mouth into the atmosphere, turned into a word, becoming meaning in the brains of those who get to hear it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Atmospheric Memory<\/em> is also a surveillance infrastructure, mining the visitor\u2019s presence and actions in the room in a search for meaning and structure. The piece dialogues with spectacle and deploys technologies that are frequently at the service of power, and it explicitly reveals itself as such. As the novelty factor of the immersive box inevitably fades in the coming decade, the global infrastructure of spaces and technologies that it has left behind can, perhaps, become open to different, multiple experiments. What lies in the cultural logic of the inversive, and beyond?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What is immersive? There doesn\u2019t seem to be a lot of demand for a proper, precise definition of one of the most overused terms of the last decade, at least in media and marketing. We mostly assume that it\u2019s one of those things that falls within the \u201cI\u2019ll know it when I see it\u201d category. But I can\u2019t help being curious about what we are calling immersive these days. The label is applied indiscriminately and with little precision, attached to things that are completely different, from a digital projection on semi-transparent layers in a public [NOTE count=1]space,[\/NOTE][REF count=1]Jason Pirodsky, \u201cLong-lost Prague Railway Station Steams Back to Life in Immersive Installation,\u201d expats.cz,<\/em> October 25, 2025, accessible online.[\/REF] to a mechanical musical [NOTE count=2]sculpture,[\/NOTE][REF count=2]Laurent de Sortiraparis, \u201cSole Crushing <\/br>by Meriem Bennani: Our Photos of the Immersive Installation at Lafayette Anticipations,\u201d Sortir \u00e0\u00a0Paris,<\/em> October 21, 2025, accessible online.[\/REF] to a luxury showroom presenting contemporary [NOTE count=3]furniture.[\/NOTE][REF count=3]Leen al Saadi, \u201cLoro Piana and Dimoremilano Debut Immersive La Prima Notte di Quiete Installation at Milan Design Week 2025,\u201d Vogue Arabia,<\/em> September 11, 2025, accessible online.[\/REF]<\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":272986,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[7754],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[7781],"artistes":[7795,7819,7815,1747],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[319],"class_list":["post-273014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-116-immersion-en","auteurs-jose-luis-de-vicente-en","artistes-char-davies-en","artistes-david-hockney-en","artistes-kurt-hentschlager-en","artistes-rafael-lozano-hemmer-en","type_post-principal"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273014"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":273627,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273014\/revisions\/273627"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/272986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273014"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=273014"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=273014"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=273014"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=273014"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=273014"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=273014"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=273014"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=273014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}