Immersive Art Experiences – The Future Of Art, Or Just A Trend?
In the last few years, we haven’t seen so much of a new wave of art but a new wave of how we experience art. Immersive art has been literally popping up across Europe, America and Asia and it’s made for hot discussion in the art and culture space. However, as with anything that appears so quickly and steals the conversation, we can’t help but wonder, is immersive art going to change the art world, or is it just another trend?
I attended the Van Gogh immersive art experience, Alive, at the Brighton Dome earlier this summer. Although Brighton has a reputation as a thriving city full of culture and artistic expression, we rather lack art. There are but a few small galleries where most of the artwork is there for sale and art collections do not generally come to Brighton for display. To view both modern and more traditional art, especially those more famous works, you must venture to London, Paris, New York and other capital cities. In terms of accessibility to art, location is often a barrier – the need to travel to experience it in person makes it difficult, if not impossible, for many people. Of course, immersive art does not solve this problem, since you’re not looking at the actual paintings. However, you certainly get more of a sense of the real work than you can from a computer screen, in a book or even on a print and there are quite a few immersive shows that tour.
When I visited Alive, I wasn’t surprised that the exhibition was so busy. Lighthouse have put on many shows across the world, reimagining the works of Frida Kahlo, Klimt and Monet, amongst others, and using light projections, music and other sensory techniques to bring them to life. They have, in terms of ticket sales, been a great success. Critiques have been varied which is to be expected in the art world as it does tend to provoke strong opinions, but on the whole immersive art has captured the interest of both established art lovers and those formally less likely to attend art exhibitions. So, I was surprised to hear recently that Lighthouse Immersive had declared bankruptcy.
Is Lighthouse Immersive’s Closure A Sign That Immersive Art Has Failed?
Companies find themselves filing for bankruptcy for various reasons and often this doesn’t have anything to do with the popularity of their offering. Those first-wave pioneers who start out leading movements often fall into financial traps or legal traps as they are the first to leap over the trenches, but this doesn’t mean the movement will die with them. Take the music download service, Napster. Napster was short-lived but it changed the way we experienced and purchased music. It completely disrupted the industry and arguably music streaming is mainstream now because of Napster and those first companies. Similarly, Ask Jeeves changed the way we searched the internet and, despite it no longer being in use, search engine providers have become some of the most powerful organisations in the world. So, whilst it is still very possible that immersive art may be a trend that dies out over time, the closure of one immersive experience company is unlikely to be a sign of dying interest in the idea.
Besides, many others are having success. The David Hockney immersive art experience, Bigger and Closer, has been hugely popular and, unlike the others, had direct involvement from the artist in the creation of the experience. For those who prefer to see famous works by a variety of artists, there is Frameless at Marble Arch where 42 masterpieces are displayed in digital large-scale formats.
Wake The Tiger are a valued client of ReWork and they are certainly a business with vision. Within their Amazement Park in Bristol, visitors wander from room to room absorbed in the unique worlds they have created fusing art installations with digital effects designed to add to and enhance the experience.
Meow Wolf are also making waves with what may be described as installation art taken to a new level. They transform spaces into feasts for the eyes (and other senses), playing with light, music and storytelling to create experiences where visitors are not only viewers but participants.
Is Immersive Art Any Good?
This is an impossible question to answer straightforwardly as all art is subjective. However, despite criticism (sometimes fair) from traditional art lovers, critics and institutions, there is much to be valued in immersive art.
Immersive art seems to be finding its feet. Currently, it has one foot in reimagining and repackaging existing art using digitalisation, and one foot is in creating new art designed to be immersive. So, let’s first look at how pre-existing art has been used.
As I alluded to in my introduction, the Van Gogh immersive experience made the works accessible to me. No, it’s not the same as seeing the real artwork. You don’t get the sense of depth and texture, or scale in physical form. On the other hand, you do get to see more detail as the works are so much larger. They even add motion so you get the sense of movement Gogh was attempting to convey in many of his paintings. Some might say this is ‘doing the work for you’ and therefore audiences may fail to discover the beauty, intricacies and meaning behind the work for themselves, thereby depriving them of that journey. However, if you cannot get to see the works in person, immersive art can help you to get closer.
Scale plays a major part in immersion. If you were to see Monet’s Water Lillies in New York, you would find yourself in a room at the MoMA with these large canvases around/in front of you. You can see them from further away and you can see the brushstrokes right up close.
However, if you were to visit the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa, you would be looking at a painting from some distance that measures just 77x53cm. This can make becoming immersed in the work more challenging.
Unfortunately, I have also stood in galleries and watched visitors more glued to their smartphones than the art, because the most immersive experience we have these days is the device so often attached to our hands. Immersive art aims to steal focus. It is less quiet and arguably works harder to stimulate audiences who may be more easily distracted than past generations. Hence, some argue that immersive art is an especially good way to introduce children to great artists and great works.
The best immersive experiences envelop the senses. Many incorporate music or other sounds, some even add scents and many use light and colour to provide a fuller sensory experience. There is much speculation over whether the great artists would appreciate their work being digitalised in this way. Yet, since Dali was fascinated by film and particularly dream sequence design, he may well have loved the Dali Cybernetics immersive art show, showcasing his work to the soundtrack of Pink Floyd. Monet painted on such large canvases because he wanted viewers to be submerged within the art and it’s said that Van Gogh longed so much to be immersed in his work that he ate the paint.
Our fascination with storytelling also plays a part in the rise of immersive art. As human beings, we have always been storytellers, but storytelling is trending as a preferred method of sharing information. We see this on social media, where stories often get more engagement than static images or text posts. These ‘stories’ tend to use moving images and text and sometimes even music.
What I found uniquely interesting about my immersive art experience was how it told the story of the artist using his paintings and his words, set to the backdrop of music which mirrored the emotion in different parts of the story. It was impossible to separate the art from the artist and that deepened my understanding of both the art and the work, as well as my emotional connection to it. A plaque next to a painting in a gallery will struggle to compete with this.
Can Traditional Art And Immersive Art Experiences Thrive Together?
As an artist and lover of art, I want to see the art world thrive. Immersive art could be one of the means of capturing the attention and curiosity of potential art-lovers, or even future creators.
But what of our beloved works of art? Will the paintings of the greats be collecting dust in empty galleries in ten years as digitalisation takes over? It’s a reasonable fear. Except, art has always gone through movements. The rise of pop art did not stop anyone from visiting the Renaissance works. In fact, these works are often showcased in the same buildings and viewed by the same audiences. So, why should digital/digitalised art be any different? Argubly, David Hockney has drawn a whole new audience with his digital art.
Much of the fear from art traditionalists is concern that immersive art experiences will drive visitors away from galleries where physical artworks are displayed. Given the struggles of galleries to finance their exhibitions and keep visitors discovering and returning to their displays, this is a very real concern. Hence why the immersive art trend may be seen as a threat to visitor numbers for galleries.
If you can see digitalised art, combined with engaging storytelling and other sensory enhancements, why then bother to see the actual paintings? This is something I believe galleries and immersive art creators can work together on. If immersive art is introducing and inspiring people to get closer to art then it stands to reason they’ll want to see the work in their physical form. However, they need the information and prompts to do so. There needs to be a pathway between the experiences and the galleries that host the actual works.
Galleries may also take inspiration from the storytelling aspect of immersive art to ensure they are better supporting their visitors to experience the art more deeply. This may be through more guided tours or by using technology to enhance the experience and ensure visitors are learning and that their curiosity is sparked.
Digitalisation of art and physical art can capture the same audiences if they work together to do so. Immersive experiences can be seen as disruptive to the art world, but the art world is a place that has been disrupted over and over again and has only emerged stronger, more diverse and more interesting because of it.
Where Does Immersive Art Go From Here?
Again, another impossible question to answer. Yet, I feel immersive experiences that have been created around the most famous artists and their existing works may be the audience-friendly gateway into a new form of art that incorporates digitalisation and immersion, with the aid of technology and sensory elements.
Immersive art is a different way of experiencing creativity. Instead of simply admiring a static piece of work, immersion, if effective (and quite a bit still isn’t), is designed to draw us in and even alter our consciousness, In some cases, immersive art can encourage our own explorative and creative thoughts and feelings.
Of course, this is not entirely new. Many people claim to experience this rise and fall of emotion when seeing an opera, classical music concert, a film or even reading a book. Yet, in most of the art movements throughout history, we are still experiencing art in its physical form, keen to be immersed but often feeling separated.
During the Pandemic, artist Kaarina Chu Mackenzie became isolated in her New York flat. With her heritage being Taiwanese-American, her childhood spent in China and then moving to the US, she had long used art to explore her identity and cultural influences. Feeling the effects of lockdown in America she found her mind wandering to the night markets she so loved in Taiwan, and she began to paint them. Mostly from photographs. She missed being in Taiwan with her family – she missed the sounds, the colours, the smells, the scenes – and so she recreated those scenes on canvases in her living room to make her feel less homesick.
Mackenzie exhibited her Night Market collection at the Bobblehaus Gallery in New York this year and although her paintings were the main focus, and displayed in physical form, the exhibit was styled as an immersive experience. Recordings of real sounds from a bustling Taiwan night market filled the rooms, objects were incorporated to make the space feel closer to the scenes depicted in the artwork and they even brought in chefs to cook up Taiwanese street food so the space could be filled with the right smells and visitors could eat as they experienced the art. This was on a much smaller scale than the big immersive shows we’ve looked at in this article and it didn’t involve digitalisation of art. Yet, it’s a wonderful example of how gallery spaces can work with artists to make exhibits more immersive and elevate the experience. I believe, and hope, that we will see more of these types of art exhibitions which remain true to the works but also work that bit harder to engage and to attract new audiences.
Art has always gone through movements and none of those movements have become the ‘future of art’. We have not lost the movements, nor lost interest in the works that came before and I don’t expect art digitalisation or immersive art to be any different. However, I do believe that galleries, immersive experience companies, and immersive art creators, need to work together to thrive. Otherwise, rather than inviting them to experience everything, they’ll be asking audiences to choose between the old and the new, which isn’t just bad business – it’s also a failure to be creative.
