The Subversive Immersive
Track 23 // Vol. 06: Future Anticipation
I’m about a decade late to the party, but I did my first Escape Room last month. I entered with some skepticism and low expectations, but ended up having a blast largely in part because I spent time with some of my favorite people. What I appreciated most was how it took me out of my day-to-day life, sucked me into a story, and gave me a mission to complete as part of a team. Forced to put our phones away, I didn’t think about capturing the moment or checking texts. After we solved it, I felt unexpectedly refreshed. The point was to escape from the room, but it also offered an escape from the mundane and an intense holiday season.
I mentioned that feeling on the car ride home, and we all acknowledged how good it felt to be present and focused on a goal together, all contained within an hour-long adventure-in-a-box. My brother-in-law explained it was why he loved Sleep No More, the immersive, participatory MacBeth production that takes place at the McKittrick hotel in NYC, where the audience moves from room to room, witnessing the play in recurring pieces. That night, he suggested we watch The Game, the 1997 thriller starring Michael Douglass, who plays a wealthy banker. In the movie, his estranged brother, played by Sean Penn, gives him a mysterious gift—a simulation game that blurs the lines of real life, designed specifically for its player. Intrigued, or perhaps bored and complacent in his lonely affluence, Michael Douglass’s character opts into the game—but realizes it’s not so much a game as it is a hostile takeover of his life. Throughout the movie, we watch him question reality as he loses everything. The true gift he receives in the end, is perspective. (I won’t spoil it further, it’s actually quite good.)
The theme for that day connected to what I’d been thinking about a lot over the last couple of months—immersive experiences. After I got back from my trip to Japan last November, I knew I wanted to write about visiting teamLab Planets, a digital arts museum in Tokyo where I saw one of my favorite art exhibitions of the last year. There, my family and I encountered delightful mirrored spaces—my favorite included a room with live, hanging orchids suspended from the ceiling. We laid on the floor and watched them lower down until they hovered all around us. A long, dark hallway led us into a knee-deep, glowing pool full of projections of carp swimming around in the water. I felt like I was inside of an infinite disco ball with swaying LED rods in another room. We moved through more hallways and found another reflective, color-changing chamber where we bounced giant inflatable balls off the walls.
teamLab, founded in 2001 by Toshiyuki Inoko, is an international art collective whose “collaborative practice seeks to navigate the confluence of art, science, technology, and the natural world.” I loved teamLab Planets because it felt so unique from a visual and spatial perspective. Its technology cast a future that sparkled with wonder and thrills. I had seen Instagram posts of teamLab’s spaces previously, but it still exceeded my expectations in the cohesive way we moved through the museum, the depth of concepts, and the degree to which the entrancing combination of lights, colors, projections, mirrors, and plants altered my perception. I noticed how much I wanted to capture every vantage point, reflected surface, and light projection. I indulged in the itch to take selfies, family candids, and posed group shots, but I also felt tension alongside my awe. I hate the feeling when I wonder if I looked at the camera screen more than the moment in real time. I’m secretly relieved when there’s a no-photo policy even though my camera roll is now a surrogate memory bank.
In the last decade, we’ve seen a huge surge in immersive art experiences. Pop-up “museums” like The Color Factory and the Museum of Ice Cream grew in popularity in the mid-2010s. Alongside the rise of Instagram, Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms captivated the public and demanded out-the-door waiting lines, even though they have been around since 1965. (When I went to see one in 2019 at David Zwirner Gallery, the attendant described it as “a finite experience in infinity,” when I finally got to the front of the line. I wasn’t sure if they were talking about the room itself or the 90 minutes of waiting in the rain to get there.) And within the last few years, the multi-city Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit, which invites audiences to step inside paintings via large wall-to-wall projections, has since expanded to franchise artists like Claude Monet, Frida Kahlo, Gustav Klimt, and others. More competing copycat exhibitions keep popping up. Last year, I even saw posters advertising an immersive experience for The Vatican in Boston.
My own encounters with immersive art swing from hit or miss, ranging from very gimmicky to very compelling. I went to an immersive Van Gogh exhibit in 2021 and felt underwhelmed. The add-ons like the $5 VR headset and various VIP packages on top of a pricey admission made it feel corporate. What I hope to gain through experiencing art—learning new things, feeling moved, altering my perspective, didn’t happen for me there. And yet I, like so many others, keep going back for more, waiting in long lines, shelling out more money for one exhibition than a typical museum entry fee.
What are we seeking from these experiences? Is immersive art just a trend or a more permanent part of art’s ever evolving future?
Track 23 is about immersion as the future of art. Defy the rules of space. Transcend reality. Stay present. Put your phone away!
Last year, The New Yorker published an article by Anna Wiener entitled, “The Rise of “Immersive” Art,” which outlined a comprehensive roundup of the motivations, contexts, and experiences people get out of these kinds of exhibitions. Wiener referenced a Rosalind Krauss essay from October in 1990, which described the evolution of minimalist art from the 1960s and how artists, like Dan Flavin and James Turrell in the 1980s pushed space into becoming the “art object” itself. After reading The New Yorker article, I fired up the ol’ JSTOR account to read Krauss’ full text, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum.” In it, Krauss argues that Minimalism (think of artists like Richard Serra, Donald Judd, and Robert Morris, etc.) changed our perception and thus expectations of art so that we demand more from the spatial presentation. It’s not just about the sculpture or the painting—it’s everything about the event, from the lighting and architecture, to grasping the emotive, theatrical arc. Krauss expanded on some ideas from the Guggenheim’s international affairs advisor, Tom Krens, adding:
“It is Minimalism Krens says in relation to his revelation, that has reshaped the way we, as late twentieth-century viewers, look at art: the demands we now put on it; our need to experience it along with its interaction with the space in which it exists; our need to have a cumulative, serial, crescendo towards the intensity of this experience; our need to have more and at a larger scale.”
The Minimalism of the 1960s stripped the art of history, context, and the artist’s hand, making viewers comfortable with “seriality, of multiples without originals.” I think of Donald Judd’s boxes stacked like shelves, or accidentally stepping on Carl Andre’s floor tiles—mundane objects that rely on space to become activated. Within a lot of our current immersive experiences, the objects are now illusions, designed to be walked through, waded into, even touched through space as the vehicle, often manipulated to look warped, confusing, and endless.
By the end of the essay, Krauss predicted that the museum will essentially become an amusement park, which feels very spot-on 30 years later:
“And it also does not stretch the imagination too much to realize that this industrialized museum will have much more in common with other industrialized areas of leisure—Disneyland say—than it will with the older, pre-industrial museum. Thus it will be dealing with mass markets, rather than art markets, and with simulacral experience rather than aesthetic immediacy.”
While I loved teamLab Planets, we waited in what felt like a long snaking line for a Disney ride, even with our timed reservations. While inside, we all felt inspired to play—I ran through curtains of hanging LED light rods with no abandon until I was kindly asked to stop. Oops. (So embarrassing! But clearly I was not the first nor the last to do that.)
Maybe you, like me, consumed Netflix’s Emily in Paris from the same impulses that lead you to eat frosting straight from the can (non, je ne regrette rien!)—a craving for mind-numbing sweetness and easy escapism. If so, you might remember the scene where she visits an Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit in season 2 with her will-they-won’t-they love interest. In season 3, they visit the very ‘grammable PopAir Balloon Museum, where she does in fact, post pictures of herself the entire time she’s there. I learned that the Balloon Museum is indeed a real place, where you too can have romantic times worthy of the silver screen while sharing your FOMO-inducing selfies. I hear Krauss’ words, “industrialized areas of leisure” echoing in these spaces. It feels different than other scenes in the show that take place at the Musée D’Orsay or the Eiffel Tower—this is pure product placement—the fun is in showing where you are, not being present in it. And I know, because I’ve succumbed to this too, and will probably do it again.
In her New Yorker article, Wiener also described her experience visiting “Continuity,” teamLab’s 2022 exhibition in San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum. She took pictures of her surroundings and texted some to her friend:
“The images looked somehow more arresting and otherworldly on a small screen—more consistent with the elevated rhetoric of the show. In person, the projections were legibly one-dimensional, but in photographs the gallery’s mirrored walls gave the impression of endless depth.”
Her friend noted that they seemed strange, responding with, “There’s something interesting about something so maximal falling so short. The thing that’s truly immersive is your phone.”
Out of the entire article, that last line sticks with me most. It made me cringe, realizing just how true it feels. How many times have I been sucked into doom-scrolling and been shocked at the time spent when I snap out of it? I think about how Yayoi Kusama conceptualized Infinity Rooms decades before smart phones and how they organically synced alongside technology and social media, thus making them some of her most “successful” work in terms of commercial viability. And now, we see spaces influenced by her work, specifically designed for phone cameras, for TikTok and Instagram, feeding into our FOMO-prone feelings and desires.
Although Rosalind Krauss didn’t predict social media and its effects on art, she was right about the greater spatial expectations and desire for spectacle from viewers in the future. She asserted that, “the imaginary space projected by the artist… will prepare its subjects—its readers or viewers to occupy a future real world which the work of art has already brought them to imagine, a world restructured not through the present but through the next moment in the history of capital.”
I’m less convinced that immersive art is about being present in the experience, but rather, to feel like you’re projected into the future, that you're producing the initial momentum of a great wave before it caves in on itself or crashes on land, that you’re ultimately creating value through your participation. Where do we draw the line between art and amusement park, between patron and player? The connection between Minimalism, a countercultural movement that valued simplicity and order, and the loud, colorful, immersive art experiences of our present time, is less of an evolution or reaction to aesthetics, but more of a transcendence of the physical art object itself. We’re not looking at sculptures or paintings, we’re looking at ourselves reflected back in a mirrored wall, on a phone screen. We become the canvas, the bronze cast. The environment responds to our movements. It isn’t art unless we’re in it. Are we now the mundane objects that rely on space to become activated?
Technology pushes us further into disrupting traditional modes of expression. A consequence of this is how it makes things feel dated faster. None of this art feels “timeless” to me. When I’m in a space designed for my own in-person experience instead of a phone screen, I appreciate the novelty and the curiosity I feel when encountering new (to me) technology and how it can manipulate my sensory perception and expectations. I know technology integrated in more “established” spaces like museums often receives pushback at first, but we’re now more accustomed to the relationship between tech and visual art. But what about other art experiences like theater, dance, and music performances?
A little over a decade ago, I was blown away by the use of video art and responsive projections during The Met Opera’s production of Wagner’s Das Rheingold. In the opening scene of the first act, whenever the three Rheinmaidens moved, singing in beautiful harmonies, suspended on wires, the stage projections of water responded accordingly, shifting the bubbles, pebbles, and shimmering waves around them. It was sonically and visually stunning. In the final act, the rainbow bridge to Valhalla radiated with light and color, also created by projections. The production was gorgeous, and for me enhanced the music without distracting from it. It’s one of the most memorable stages I’ve ever seen. Not everyone felt as enthusiastic about Robert Lepage’s production, or the more modern direction championed by the Met’s general manager Peter Gelb, who has aimed to entice younger audiences to the opera since the mid-aughts. Stripping some of the Met’s more beloved, ornate stage settings with new “novel ideas,” Gelb makes bold, controversial choices—sometimes alienating the established older audience and donors in favor of innovating the art form. According to Reuters, this production of Das Rheingold cost $15 million dollars, an investment towards future crowds using technology, quite literally, as the bridge to new generations. In the context of opera, an art form with high barriers of access, does technology make it more approachable? More palatable?
Around the same time, I went to Coachella in 2012 and witnessed the reincarnation of Tupac Shakur in the form of “Hologram Tupac,” who performed alongside Dr. Dre, Snoop Dog, Eminem, and 50 Cent. I was far from the stage, but was still mesmerized by the glowing being in the distance, a culmination of light beams that mimicked the mannerisms and flow of the late rapper. I felt strange watching it, it was like a ghost that transformed the Coachella Valley into an uncanny one. We’ve seen a few more examples of late hologram performers, most notably the 2022 Vegas residency, An Evening with Whitney: The Whitney Houston Hologram Tour. I watched YouTube performance clips of the show (see below) and while the technology has improved somewhat, it still feels weird, haunting, and almost blasphemous? Will we see more of this in the future of concerts as a way to bring our favorite legacy acts to new generations? Is this still a performance? Is this art? With an animated star and human back-up performers—is this…Space Jam? While I think it’s important to keep their music alive, I have to agree with legendary singer and Whitney’s cousin, Dionne Warwick, who never supported the idea, stating, “You can never recreate Whitney, ever.”
Technology throughout art history always gets a bad rap at the start, but think of how it has multiplied possibilities in creative expression. For example, Vermeer’s camera obscura and Van Gogh’s perspective frame innovated in Western painting traditions. Photography when it first emerged, was not accepted as an art form during the 19th century. But when cameras paired with the high vantage points achieved by the first skyscrapers built around the same time, photographers like Alfred Stigelitz could produce unprecedented images of urban environments that helped establish its place in the art world. I’ll admit that I find all the new AI art and ChatGPT terrifying and problematic, but it’s also a fascinating time to see what opportunities come when you’re able to influence new technological spaces. When innovation intersects with expression, how can art advance the possibilities of our own perception?
I want to end by acknowledging that while some of these immersive experiences seem corporate and somewhat soulless, I’m not here to yuck anyone’s yum. I think these spaces can also be fun and memorable—that’s enough to be worthwhile! I also believe they can make art feel more accessible than museums or galleries because they tend to invite more play, roaming, and wonder. I take for granted sometimes that museums can be intimidating places to navigate. And honestly, at the last gallery show I attended, I felt out of place because I wasn’t wearing a monochrome pantsuit with an edgy, architectural haircut. (I guess there are so many ways to be seen within art spaces.) I appreciate any gateway when it leads to a positive interaction and experience with art, especially when it helps people to let go and enjoy.
Finally, I want to reject the idea that our phones are the only truly immersive things now! What about nature? When I think back to my first “immersive” experience, I think it was climbing a tree, looking up at the shapes of sky formed by intersecting branches, reaching higher to get a closer look.
Thanks for reading.
I read today's The Drip from first word to last. The deeper I got, the more I kept thinking about the connection between these immersive experiences and the Metaverse. Art often eases new ideas into society, could it be that Museums of Whatever and Immersive Artist Exhibits are not just bringing us Art more accessibly (or maybe just "art") but might they also be priming us to understand how to operate in virtual spaces without any connection to what we define today as art?
Great article. Sounds like a blast.