Immersion as category of audiovisual experience: From Long Beach to Hollywood

Giacomo Albert

Università degli Studi di Torino
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1. Introduction

Immersion is a cognitive modality based on the sensation, whether arising from a real situation or induced by a virtual space, of finding oneself in an environment and being part of it, of being immersed in it. It is a fundamental category in the definitions of specific artistic and commercial genres such as virtual art (Popper 2007; Grau 2003) and the videogame (Lehto 2009, McMahan 2003), and a key feature in concepts like multimedia (Packer-Jordan 2001) and 'digital multimedia arts' (Balzola-Monteverdi 2004: 13-14), recently interpreted as fundamental category for the understanding and interpretation of the recent developments in audiovisual experience (Rose 2009), and analysed in relation to sound and audio (Dyson 2009). Immersion aims at the involvement of the viewer in the work, within its own space, as part of it; the immersive work aims to build an unmediated relationship with the viewer (Bolter – Grusin 1999), creating the illusion of belonging to its world. Immersion destroys the frame that separates the world of the work from that of the viewer. In this sense, the work is no longer an object at a remove from the audience, that can be interpreted adopting a semantic horizon that is external to the one adopted in everyday life: the reality becomes confused with the work. The immersive work does not have a prevailing figurative function, nor does it represent or stand for anything: it is an environment to be experienced firsthand. Its goal is primarily to constitute a presence, not to represent something. Instead of a sign-based, cognitive paradigm it uses a perceptive paradigm involving the construction and constitution of a reality, a tactile, kinaesthetic actuality which involves the viewer’s whole body.

Thus immersion is a modal category which concerns the relationship between viewer and work, i.e. the work’s cognitive modalities, rather than a medial category, i.e. as something inherent to the media’s internal structure. Surrounding the viewer with multiple sensorial stimuli may denote an immersive type strategy, but it is not a sufficient or necessary condition for a work to be defined according to this category. For this reason, too, immersion can take a multiplicity of different forms and genres, from the new media art to the videogame, as well as more traditional forms such as cinema and the audiovisual installation – the two forms we look at here. In fact it is a category which concerns the aesthetic conception governing the work’s creation rather than the formal boundaries of the artistic forms and genres. It is not a property inherent to the media: it depends on the viewer’s perception or experience of them, and thus on one hand on the degree of both novelty (for the viewer) and knowledge accumulated in previous experiences (Grau 2003; 2005), and on the other on the details and compositional strategies pursued by the artist during the construction of the work as a whole.

In this essay we shall illustrate the complexity of the category of immersion, showing how it can take a multiplicity of forms. We shall investigate two such forms by analysing two contemporary works that represent different expressive forms, adopting opposing narrative strategies, that were conceived with different aims and presuppose a completely different productive texture, even if they are very close both geographically and chronologically: The Ring, a horror film made in Hollywood in 2002 and Pneuma, an audiovisual installation made by Bill Viola 'just down the road' in Long Beach in 2004. We shall thus compare two cultural objects which are overtly different, starting from observations made by Viola himself (1990) and by Holly Rogers (2005). We shall investigate them by pointing out the differences between them, highlighting the basic principles that underlie the experiential forms they engender, which would not emerge from a comparison of similar cultural objects. We intend to show the existence of various forms of immersion, with opposing modalities of action on the viewer’s cognition, while remaining within a similar paradigm, i.e. multiple typologies of immersive spaces.

Through these examples we also hope to show how the specific modalities in which the immersive experience manifests itself are determined by a series of elements collocated on different planes and reflected in the details of the techniques and compositional strategies elaborated and adopted by the artist: they are decisive not only for the work’s compositional but also for its social dimension (among others), and establish the basis for their aesthetical conception.