Date: Sat, 03 Aug 1996 22:06:56 +0100
From: joseph nechvatal <jnech-AT-imaginet.fr>
Subject: immersive ideal


As of today, I have my own Bulletin Board discussion area up on The THING web 
site for the discussion of the theme : IMMERSIVE IDEALS / CRITICAL 
DISTANCES 

at:  http://www.thing.net/thingnyc/msgboard.html

I sincerely hope you will join in the discussion.

The issue(s) under consideration : an examination of the affinity between art based in 
Virtual Reality  (VR) and previous artistic expressions of the "immersive ideal".

INTRODUCTION :
This board will attempt a speculative, hypothetical, theoretical account of the artistic 
heritage which precedes VR immersion - the emblematic characteristic of Virtual 
Reality (VR) and all aspects of the "immersive ideal".  My hope is that here we may 
collectively identify, define and evaluate the immersive ideal as it is found in artworks 
utilizing Virtual Reality technology and in previous artistic movements and periods in 
the history of art. The primary objective is to create a cross analysis of the immersive  
aspects of art employing the technology of Virtual Reality, recent  postmodern and 
modern avant-garde art movements which will lead to the identification of  immersive 
visionary ideals in art as they have emerged throughout art history. An examination 
will be made of the capability of high technology computing systems to realize these 
earlier artistic immersive ideals within a contemporary framework.


BACKGROUND :
What does my terminology 'immersive ideal' mean? Obviously its meaning would 
consist, at least in part, of the two halves of the phrase : immersion and idealism. 

Immersion is the principal feature of VR systems. VR immersion, though clearly 
phenomenologically different from previous ideas and ideals of artistic immersion is, 
I propose, shaped by the subconscious effects of all human visionary traditions whose 
narratives and ways of envisioning the world (the imaginary virtual visionary world) 
have entered into our collective memories and thus culture. Consequently they have 
shaped our expectations for the technical virtuosity of artistic VR mediated data 
immersion. Thus the interest in a rear-view look at artistic immersion in light of VR. 

Idealism: 
It can be shown that there have long been ideas of ideal virtual immersion, whether 
grounded in mysticism, sex / violence (Bataille), abstract analytical thought  
(Baudrillard), or romantic fantasy (Gibson, et all).  All of these historical approaches 
have sought to shape  and manipulated invisible worlds accessible only through the 
imagination, and in some cases have led to  models which have achieved ontological 
privilege.  

I am beginning this board with the initial contention that immersion in a VR system is 
quickly becoming the key to understanding a great deal of contemporary cyberculture 
as well as aspects of non and pre-computer culture. It is indisputable that today the 
image is resurgent if not triumphant in the West (Baudrillard) and VR represents the 
creme de la creme of illusionistic image production - the latest thing.  

-- A history of immersion in art and how this history informs our notions and critical 
evaluations of the emerging field of telematic interactive connectivity --

Immersion as an artistic strategy (though it was not called 'immersion') first came to 
my attention in my role as La Monte Young's archivist for the Dia Art Foundation. By 
involving myself with the history of Fluxus and the early 60s I became familiar with 
the immersive strategies suggested by the ideological conflating of art with life which 
I detected as a principle drive of most of the avant-garde art of the era. For example 
Allan Kaprow stated in his 1958 Artnew article The Legacy of Jackson Pollock 
(Artnews 57 / October 1958) "...what I believe is clearly discernible is that the entire  
painting comes out at the participant (I shall call him that, rather than observer) right 
into the room.....  In the present case the 'picture' has moved so far out that the canvas 
is no longer a reference point. Hence, although up on the wall, these marks surround 
us as they did the painter at work....." 

Of course the influence of the large scale panorama in painting as introduced to 
Pollock through the revolutionary Mexican muralist movement must be 
acknowledged as well as the spaciousness and immersiveness of Navaho sand 
painting. With respect to Pollock, Harold Rosenberg in the early 1950s argued, "At a 
certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an 
arena in which to act - rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design; analyze 
or 'express' an object, actual or imagined". This immersive arena is metaphorical but 
analogous to VR immersion space.  

My gut feeling is that immersion in art holds the possibility of bringing the hidden, 
overwhelmed, internal life of the mind to light, to overflow our records of experience, 
and to reconstruct our sensations anew, for immersion transpires in deep space and, in 
a sense, secures that space for us.  As Yves Klein said of his 20 x 7 meter Klein Blue 
mural which he created for the Gelsenkirchen Opera House in Germany : "It gives 
rise to a sense of immersion in a space greater than infinity". As a result art seeps 
more fully around us into the room and eventually outside of the room as well into the 
street creating a new relationship between spectator, artwork and frame.

 A recent example of the immersive ideal can be located in the immersive 
performance collaboration between Bill Seaman and Carlos Hernandez of 1981 called 
"Architectural Hearing Aids". A specially prepared car drove the participant - viewer 
on a one hour forty minute drive, a specific tour of San Francisco where the 
architecture was qualified by music which was prepared to matched it, music which 
was composed specifically to alter the perception of the architecture.  In a sense they 
made a sound track to reality so that the car itself, installed with two different sound 
systems and a 4 track mixer - 7 speaker in all which enveloped the participant in 
immersive sound which mixed with live environmental sounds - became the vehicle 
of immersion, as was the car itself immersed in the greater city at large. In effect a 
double immersion. 

Lucio Fontana's concept of "spazialismo' (Spacialism) which he published in his 1946 
Manifest Blanco is also evocative of the immersive ideal. In it he decreed that 
Spatialism aimed at transcending the illusory space of pre-modernist art and integrated 
art with architecture and the larger environment in an effort to render permeable the 
restraining barrier of the edge of the picture plane and establish an enlarged spatial 
praxis.


GOAL :
In art we receive coded messages whose code we must break. How fully art functions 
as art is an exceptionally complex issue, suggesting a need for a theory. Perhaps in 
light of VR, a larger theory of art is needed - a theory of immersive imagination which 
leads to a consciousness of one's place within an artistic picture plane - one without 
fixed edges or even a fixed surface. Perhaps inversely we need a larger theory of VR 
also -a VR theory in light of the hermeneutic artistic tradition of interpretation and 
communicative symbolic interaction where immersion is both signifier and signified?  
In the immersive all-over field, which this board proposes to identify,  concentration 
on the picture plane is spacialized in favor of a larger consideration of the spacialized, 
dematerialized relationship between artist and the spectator's cultural field.  Thus the 
"immersive ideal" is without ground or fixed surface and hence both life and art, work 
and dream, social discourse and spectacle.  

TO START : 
We might start hypothesizing whether such a perifial encounter with the work of art 
would extend consciousness laterally and horizontally, extending and flexing 
perceptive reception  into an area normally unconscious and inaccessible to direct 
self-conscious reflexivity. What would be the result of such an immersive artistic 
encounter which by heightening the surrounding presence is felt laterally by the viewer 
with a pattern of nerves of which we normally remain insensitive.
 
How fully art functions as art is an exceptionally complex issue, suggesting a need for 
a theory of art itself. Perhaps in light of VR, a larger theory of art is needed - a theory 
of immersive imagination which leads to a consciousness of one's place within an 
artistic picture plane without fixed edges or even a fixed surface? Perhaps inversely we 
need a larger theory of VR also -a VR theory in light of the hermeneutic artistic 
tradition of interpretation and communicative symbolic interaction where immersion 
is both signifier and signified?   

I hope we can through this IMMERSIVE IDEALS / CRITICAL DISTANCES BB 
come to understand how contemporary theories  of the virtual  relate to older  systems 
of thought, and how such ideas,  emerging from  the human imagination, have 
manifested themselves in new technological systems. I look forward to your 
participation.

Thank you.