Prosthetic architectures of the senses: museums and immersion

The coupling of museums and immersion is the focus of Alison Griffiths’s book Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums and the Immersive View.1 Her central thesis is that one cannot really talk about the ‘immersive view’ or immersion without dealing with the museum, since the idea of the museum experience also arguably aspires to ‘stimulate a rush of interest, prompt user participation, [and] foster immersion in an extraordinary environment’.2 Both museums and public cultural spaces are situations of ‘civic seeing’ that have evolved through centuries of remaking the viewing experience.3 There is, moreover, no singular optical lineage: the history of spectatorship is marked by a diversity of forms of seeing that have allowed for a multiplicity of optics and technologies and immersive strategies. The museum is also synonymous with many sensorial attributes, not only vision but also a range of acoustical, tactical and somatic characteristics. This essay attempts to articulate the grammar of digitally mediated immersion, building on the immersive nature of museums and their expansion into civic space and onto public screens. It does so by examining the design and reception of immersion in a series of immersive system, interactive media art and cultural heritage works that I have co-designed. These systems emphasize human-to-human and human-to-machine engagement, and provide powerful ways to reformulate narrative in a digital context. The installations have been realized as a result of my work in developing special projects for museums, as a curator, media artist and researcher. To illuminate how such architectures are reshaping the language and logic of immersion, I provide here five examples of immersive experiences that embrace specific immersive and interactive strategies: the panoramic (Pure Land) and the augmented (Pure Land AR), as well as the hemispheric (Travelling Kungkarangkalpa), panoptic (UNMAKEABLELOVE), and the large-scale public screen display (Zooming Sydney). These installations can be described as part of a lineage of expanded cinema, interactive cinema or ‘post-cinematic’ forms, which enable me to chart a vitally important aspect of the new museum: the shift from passive to active forms of consumption and co-creation. I argue that the next generation of immersive system design has transformed viewers into mobile agents and interactors, and has fundamentally changed the relative passivity of viewers in relation to the screen, thus transcending object/subject relations.