Art & Technology #24: Immersive Environment

In addition to watching the earth-art video of Michael Heizer in the dark, nothing obscuring the view except for the silhouettes of other museumgoers, contemporary art can use 3D glasses to transport audience in the middle of a Seoul street to a meeting with Van Gogh at a café in Arles, France, or conjure up the somersaulting avatar of French artist Orlan right into her exhibition through augmented reality. The marriage of new technologies in art is a familiar practice, but creating a highly immersive environment does not always call for high-end technologies. As in the case of Open Plan, such an environment can be put together by using space or lighting with certain characteristics to focus attention on video artworks, throwing a digital medium into an analog environment of traditional media such as painting, sculpture, or installations. As such, there are various ways to enjoy moving images that provide physical yet extrasensory experiences.

Innovative technologies and artistic sensitivity are combined to create graphics that in turn create immersive situations in an exhibition space. Artworks and exhibitions provide a virtual environment that demonstrate an outstanding sense of reality by mixing digital moving images such as videos or media art pieces combined with scientific technology, and traditional art media such as sculptures, paintings, or installations. Spatial experiments based on technology apply existing practices of 3D or 4D film viewing to video art appreciation, and create an appropriate environment by putting various media together. Here, a unique aesthetic sense is expressed in a newly generated style, in which the form and style of the existing media are integrated without compromising the new style’s own originality. By employing a comprehensive strategy of using hybridity of media and a variety of sensitivities, an environment where both art and technologies reside brings possibilities for various kinds of immersion.

As mentioned above, the advantages of artworks equipped with an immersive environment include unique aesthetic qualities and features of each medium, an extrasensory experience driven by psychological immersion, interactive involvement, and an unconventional sense of reality traveling back and forth from the virtual to the real. Among these, interactive involvement is particularly important. Being entirely immersed in artworks presents other possibilities and meanings by constructing and visualizing another system of communication between viewers and an artist. Such a new environment proposed by contemporary art is becoming more and more persuasive, backed by the development of technology and mixed application in art. Artists have long been comfortable with using this method as an instrument for artistic expression. Viewers might also have already acknowledged and accepted this as an element of contemporary art.