Embodied Worlds, Immersive Art

Leha Choppara

Meander through scenes from worldfamous artists, step into a matrix of lights that extend into an endless void, or put on a VR headset that puts you at the center of it all. This is immersive art, a polarizing term most people would react to with either strong appreciation or disdain — there is little in-between. Yet, no matter one’s opinion on the medium, the rising popularity of immersive art is undeniable. Perhaps the most (in)famous instance is the Van Gogh “Immersive Experience,” where the post-impressionist master’s work is blown up and projected onto an exhibition space, accompanied with atmospheric music, animation, and curated scents. Though art critics disparage immersive exhibits as vapid and uninspired, museums are taking note of their success and artists are finding ways to innovate and create in the medium.

The highest profile immersive art exhibits are those that display the most commonly recognisable artists, the likes of Van Gogh, Kahlo, Monet, and Klimt. They’re set up to be family friendly, parsing artworks into easily accessible formats and revamping them with special effects. A large part of them is exactly that— their scale. Entering the space swathes you in the art, and the whole affair is made out to be a spectacle. Despite ticket prices as high as $30 for the Monet Experience — which may seem excessive when compared to the €13 to see actual Monets at the Musée d’Orsay — visitors continue to flock to these exhibits.

For reference, just one of Culturespaces’ Paris venues (an immersive experience company) accounted for over 1.4 million visitors .

Along with Culturespaces, teamLab and Superblue are similar organizations running these spaces across the globe, and often work together with museums that want to draw in visitors. My first exposure to immersive art was as a child when I went to teamLab’s Future World exhibit in Singapore’s Art Science Museum, and it blew me away. At the time, the interactive floor displays and AR sections seemed revolutionary to me. However, looking back, I think it is more accurate to say that the exhibit was a stunning performance rather than an art exhibit. The art felt manufactured to be “Instagrammable.”

In fact, the increase in popularity of immersive art is likely to be a manifestation of a greater general shift towards creating photo ready moments for visitors. The trend may have begun with the Rain Room at the Barbican in 2012, an art installation that used motion sensors to allow one to walk through a downpour without getting wet. Crowds clamored to experience it, and other museums started looking for something similar for their own spaces. Now, a large part of the rise of immersion could be due to the perfect mix of increased consumer preference for social media friendly displays, rapidly improving optic and audio technological capability, and a jump in availability of cheap, central real-estate due to the pandemic.

Hockney, Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away), 2023 (installation view).

Justin Sutcliffe. Courtesy of Lightroom, London.

David Hockney’s Bigger & Closer (not smaller and further away) exhibit, which was under development for three years and opened last

February, is unique from most other immersive art experiences in that it uses art from a living artist. It has met mixed critical reviews, but still sees a large number of visitors. Refix Andol’s Unsupervised, a larger than life screen that creates displays with AI based on the MoMA’s extensive collection, has been derided as a glorified lava lamp, but is consistently popular with people coming to the museum. I believe these are examples that show there exists a disconnect, as there has always been, between what the average person finds fascinating and beautiful, and what the critical art world determines to be sufficiently meaningful. That being said, the immersive nature of the medium means that appraising art in an engaging way is discouraged. It is much harder to consider an artwork critically when the line between performance, art, and self blurs in an immersive experience. However, it is restrictive to think of the medium just in terms of how easy it is to critique it. Immersive experiences break the mold of the sterile art gallery, and create spaces where people can simply exist alongside and participate in the art.

Taiwan Streets 2024

Joey Yu @josephyu12