by Ed Rodley, The Experience Alchemists
The immersive entertainment market worldwide in 2030 is estimated to be more than $400 billion, according to Grand View Research. What percentage of that comprises the immersive art market is unknown, but it is also growing. Given the success of ventures like Superblue, Atelier des Lumieres, and teamLabs Borderless, this trend seems likely to continue. And not necessarily in favor of museums.
In a recent Art Newspaper piece, Chris Michaels quoted museum futurist András Szántó’s description of immersive institutions as “a classic case of external, potentially disruptive innovation. What it says about the challenges of the art museum in the 21st century is that it will have to compete for the public’s interest (and leisure spend) when it comes to visual experience—and it may not always win.”
Digital immersive art experiences, whether physical, hybrid, projection-based or somewhere in the AR/MR/VR/XR space, are being employed by more and more artists like Olafur Eliasson, Laurie Anderson, and Es Devlin, to name only three.
Immersive spaces are proliferating. However, there are significant hurdles to growing the immersive art space that are unique to the cultural sector.
I was recently at ACMI in Melbourne for the opening of London-based Marshmallow Laser Feast’s (MLF) “Works of Nature” exhibition. During this time, I spoke with Ersin Han Ersin of MLF. He talked about the challenges of working in the immersive art space from the artist’s perspective.
Interestingly, his concerns had little to do with the funding, creation and installation of digital immersive art. Or with the technologies involved in making computationally intensive pieces. Instead, he pointed to the lack of informed critique and an understanding of digital preservation as among the most pressing issues facing artists working in this medium.
What makes “good” immersive art?
Anyone who has been working in the immersive space for long has doubtless encountered their fair share of reviews. It is important for professionals to know what is new, how it works, and how well people are receiving it.
Ersin Han Ersin, Marshmallow Laser FeastCritique is such an important part of growing, evolving, understanding, but also creating knowledge, not just for the artists to get a critique and get better what they do, but also for an audience’s point of view… When it comes to immersive media, we don’t have it.
For immersive artists, informed critique is much harder to come by. Alke Gröppel-Wegener and Jenny Kidd are longtime practitioners in the immersive cultural heritage space. They highlight several concerns with current immersive practice in their book “Critical Encounters with Immersive Storytelling”. Two of those are interesting in this context.
One is that mainstream consumer culture is ‘co-opting’ immersive experiences. This framing is problematic, which is why the authors put it in quotes. It pits “art” as separate from and opposed to “consumer culture”.
Viewing immersive art solely through the parameter of commercial success or failure is narrow. Yet it can’t be denied that the experience economy and the larger market forces at work tremendously influence how people spend their free time. This also influences who gets to build enormously complex, expensive immersive experiences.
The other critique they make is that the conversations around immersion are largely technocratic. These conversations don’t engage with the humanistic and artistic content nearly as much as they do with the tools used to produce and present digital immersives. When the subject matter of immersive experiences is discussed, it is often in the form of debate about whether they are “authentic” experiences or not.
Immersive art and authenticity
The architectural designer and theorist Brian Lonsway, writing for an academic audience, states something evident to us, namely:
“Themed environments are authentic. They are in every way genuine, original, real, primary. They are of their own, and fashion themselves after other environments not to imitate them, but rather to reconstruct or re-contextualize them in new (authentic) ways. Yet somehow—unfathomably to me—this is not an accepted truism, especially in certain scholarly circles.”
Lonsway makes the case for a form of criticism that acknowledges the complications of visitor agency in places like immersive experiences. In this respect, he echoes Gröppel-Wegener and Kidd. They argue that:
“Off-hand dismissal of the remainder of the field as in some way inferior would seem shortsighted in the extreme, and ultimately unhelpful.”
Scanning the traditional art press may not turn up anything about immersive art other than ads. Clearly, a lot has to change, but what? Do we need to wait for a new generation of critics and curators who understand digital technologies enough not to be intimidated by them?
How do you preserve immersive art?
Ersin also pointed out that Marshmallow Laser Feast currently has to do all the work to keep its digital projects alive.
Consider all the digital assets that go into big immersive shows like “Works of Nature”. How many software packages were used, all constantly updated, eventually to the point that old file formats become unreadable? How quickly do hardware specs change, and generations of products come and go? Which of today’s digital immersive experiences could be restaged in ten or twenty years?
This theme was on the agenda when ACMI hosted the Future of Arts, Culture & Technology Symposium (FACT 2024). In “Presenting the new Canon in 2050”, panelists laid out the complexities of preserving these experiential artworks in a world complicated by IP and copyright.
Add to that the breakneck pace at which hardware and software evolve and the way licenses bind end users, and it doesn’t look good for the digital preservationist. What if someone in 2050 wanted to mount a retrospective of the state of immersive art in 2020? How much of it would still be around, in accessible formats, with the hardware needed to redisplay them?
However, things are happening. In the US, the Cooper Hewitt made waves in 2013 by announcing its first software acquisition, the iPad app “Planetary”. Meanwhile, in France, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France is opening its digital archiving process to the contents of digital creation.
Understanding the issues is key
The number of institutions trying to grapple with the issue of what and how to preserve (and frankly, whether to preserve) is growing. However, there is still a long way to go before the cultural sector understands how to engage with immersive art.
To professionals working in the immersive space, understanding these issues and figuring out ways to advance these conversations could be critical in successfully engaging with immersive artists and cultural organizations that can and should be displaying it.
