Art in the Age of Immersion: Sensing, Bodies and the Responsive Environment

Abstract

In 1968, the Polish born curator Jascia Reichardt opened a landmark exhibition at the ICA in London entitled Cybernetic Serendipty in which all manner of sensor-augmented devices, objects and sculptures stood ready to usher art into a new technological age. Remarkably, while ever more complex sensors, algorithms and devices have steadily increased in the 54 years since Reichardt's show, essentially the same goal has remained: using artificial sensing as an integral part of an artwork in order for the work to “make sense” about its “world” and respond to it. This phenomenon, what artist and theorist Simon Penny calls the “aesthetics of behavior,” perfectly aligns with the long sought- after imaginaries of artists, designers and technologists to create seamless computational links between our bodies and the larger environment and thus, reorganize the human senses in order for them to act as input for such works. But if the history and practices of “immersion” in the arts has long focused on the senses being transformed through melding them with technologies embedded into the actual physical world, the next wave of immersion seeks the opposite: to capture the senses in order to render a synthetic world that is “realer” than the physical one. In the words of computer graphics pioneer Ivan Sutherland from 1965, the new “ultimate display” (a harbinger of later VR/AR head mounted devices), would need to “serve as many senses as possible.”1 Thus, contrary to the idea that the senses are simply to be replaced by the prosthetics of artificial sensors, a different story seems to be emerging. Our senses are needed to drive and feed ever-new immersive experiences by being increasingly “coupled” or linked to the simulated. This talk will careen through TeamLab's immersive environments installed in the landfill islands of Tokyo, through the visions of artists in the 1960s to create new kinds of “reactive environments” and our now just emerging “metaverse” age of Extended Reality in order to give a critical historical and socio-technical picture of our present and future visions of art in the age of immersion.