This \u201cde-framing\u201d process prefigured today\u2019s shift from the visual arts to immersive technologies, in which the spectator no longer contemplates from a distance but enters the work itself. In this respect, water serves as a potent metaphor, from not only an aesthetic vantage point but a phenomenological one. Immersion in water and in virtual spaces invites a feeling of suspension, the loss of gravitational references, and disorientation\u200a\u2014\u200aa condition that destabilizes ordinary perception and opens new modes of embodied awareness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The underwater virtual reality (VR) cinedance Bodies of Water<\/em> (2024), co-created by Ch\u00e9lanie Beaudin-Quintin and Caroline Laurin-Beaucage, premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival in the Venice Immersive session. Experiencing the work firsthand provided an opportunity to engage with water as a dramaturgical and synesthetic force within the virtual work. This twelve-minute film, shot entirely in 3D stereoscopy, explores the relationship between the human body and water, staging a sensory metamorphosis that unfolds in a public swimming pool at nightfall. The performers immerse themselves in a liquid environment that envelops and transforms them, challenging the boundaries among dance, cinema, fiction, and visual poetry. Water, more than a simple scenic element, becomes an active choreographic agent, shaping the movements of the bodies, making them light and flexible, vulnerable, yet also combative. Through this immersive experience, viewers were invited to hold their breath, allowing themselves to be transported into a fluid universe where the borders between the real and the imaginary dissolve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Ch\u00e9lanie$
Ch\u00e9lanie Beaudin-Quintin & Caroline Laurin-Beaucage<\/strong>
Bodies of Water<\/em>, still photography, 2021.
Photo: Vivien Gaumand, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Once they donned a headset, spectators suddenly found themselves surrounded by dark, deep water. Their breathing became laboured: the atavistic impulse emerged from the fear of drowning within the image. The experience allows 360 degree rotation but not physical displacement: a condition that reinforced the sensation of apnea and suspension. Through water, they plunged into immersivity, activating a self-referential layering of images within images, a regression from reality, an endless descent into the virtual world, until they lost perception of the limits of their body. It was a continuous distancing from the dimension of reality, an enveloping in visual immersion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this sense, Bodies of Water<\/em> echoes the tragic myth of Narcissus, a young man who, in love with his reflection in a spring, consumed his life chasing an unattainable image and ultimately drowned. In fact, the tragedy consists not simply in a misjudgment but in the inability to recognize the presence of the medium: water as the material support that reflects an illusory image. Narcissus was the first to fall under its spell, ignoring the mediation that makes the apparition of the image possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Ch\u00e9lanie$
Ch\u00e9lanie Beaudin-Quintin &<\/strong>
Caroline Laurin-Beaucage<\/strong>
Bodies of Water<\/em>,
still photography, 2021.
Photo: Vivien Gaumand,
courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
The social critic Christopher Lasch highlights how the contemporary individual lives trapped in a cycle of self-observation and self-exaltation, continually reflected in the images offered by mass media.^{1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 1 <\/a> - Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations<\/em> (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979).<\/span> We fall in love not with ourselves but with our reflection, a simulacrum constructed and disseminated by technological devices. The myth of Narcissus is no longer renewed before a spring but in front of screens and digital platforms. The reflected image is an avatar, a clone, a projection that represents and replaces us. The physical body dissolves in order to be reborn as an image, in what the scholar Giacomo Ravesi has called \u201cthe death and resurrection of the body in image.\u201d^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - Giacomo Ravesi, Le Maschere di Dionisio. Figure del corpo tra arti visive, media e tecno\u00adlogia<\/em> (Rome: Armando Editore, 2021), 14 (our translation).<\/span> In this sense, immersion is not only a risk of loss but also an opportunity for metamorphosis: users immersed in virtual reality experiences may find in their avatar not a condemnation but a new form of existence. Similarly, the immersion put forward by Bodies of Water <\/em>leads to rebirth as the suspension in water, and through the digital device momentarily frees spectators from the weight and boundaries of their bodies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
The essence of time in Bodies of Water<\/em> corresponds to the unfolding of this underwater dance that seeks to transgress the limits of the body\u2019s physical environment. The plot begins at the precise moment when these ambiguous presences dive into the pool, performing broad, fluid, slowed movements. Beaudin-Quintin and Laurin-Beaucage introduce their work by \u201cinviting the public to hold their breath and let themselves be transported and transformed by water.\u201d^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - Ch\u00e9lanie Beaudin-Quintin and Caroline Laurin-Beaucage, \u00ab\u2009Venice Immersive 2024\u2013 Une eau la nuit \/ Bodies of Water\u2009\u00bb, video, YouTube<\/em>, August 28, 2024, 5:27, accessible online.<\/span> This invitation reveals that the artists\u2019 focus is not on claustrophobic immersion; rather, it is a matter of perceptual transformation. In the search for sensory correspondences between water and virtual cinematic content, auditory perception was essential. Beaudin-Quintin explains that the sound design, created by Bruno B\u00e9langer, inspired an entirely new choreography. With no on-set recording, she and Laurin-Beaucage imagined the sounds that moving bodies might make, animating the water as a living presence, a separate character interacting with and shaping the dancers\u2019 movements.^{4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 4 <\/a> - Beaudin-Quintin and Laurin-Beaucage, Venice International Film Festival.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Ch\u00e9lanie$
Ch\u00e9lanie Beaudin-Quintin & Caroline Laurin-Beaucage<\/strong>
Bodies of Water<\/em>, still photography, 2021.
Photo: Vivien Gaumand, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Bodies of Water<\/em> gives great attention to the elaboration of sound so that the perception of immersion in water and the process of identification and transformation can fully take place. As an immersive work, it effectively uses water as a synesthetic metaphor for virtual experience, having developed a concept of visual and perceptual immersion through the involvement of multiple senses. Water, as both a figurative and sonic element, becomes a dramaturgical force equal to the bodies present in the film, revealing the transcendent experience of being immersed in immersivity itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Water has always permeated the history of human imagination as a symbol of life, rebirth, and transformation, but also as a threshold of mystery. Because of its transparency and reflective qualities, as well as its fluidity and mutability, water not only stimulates the senses, but integrates them, generating a profoundly synesthetic experience. In the twentieth century, it became a plastic element that progressively accompanied the dissolution of the classical framework based on linear perspective, transforming the subject represented into an experiential medium that ultimately enveloped the viewer within the exhibition space.<\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":273211,"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":[7768],"artistes":[7827,7783],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[],"class_list":["post-273230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-116-immersion-en","auteurs-tania-gallinaro-en","artistes-caroline-laurin-beaucage-en","artistes-chelanie-beaudin-quintin-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273230","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=273230"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":273241,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273230\/revisions\/273241"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/273211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273230"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=273230"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=273230"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=273230"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=273230"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=273230"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=273230"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=273230"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=273230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}