Extending Reality and Empowering Audiences: Immersive Digitised Experiences
Words by Beth Jones
Immersive digital technologies have extensive potential to democratise artistic experiences by empowering audiences. The viewer’s gaze, typically bound by uneven power dynamics, can be transformed by digital interfaces; these immersive technologies provide public audiences with agency, inclusive opportunities to delve into the art itself, and engaging multisensory experiences. Harnessing digital technologies to remediate two-dimensional artworks indeed creates an environment in which individuals can literally move through art, at their own pace and own direction or angle. This process, building upon former immersive artistic strategies, has been successfully undergone in recent years with ‘Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience’. Unique touring exhibitions like these facilitate the amalgamation of different and diverse public narratives, interpretations, and perceptions within artistic spaces; digital technologies enable viewers (who, in reality, become dynamic participants) to approach otherwise-static two-dimensional artworks with their own experiences and literally physical moving bodies. Sophie Norton concluded her blog post from July 2022 titled ‘The Expansion of Digital Art Spaces’ with the assertion that this unbounded process of digitising the art world was “expand[ing] and transform[ing] art as we know it”. Delving into the empowering effects of immersive digital experiences reveals just how extensive this expansion and transformation is in specifically shaping the viewer’s gaze - not just within the arts, but indeed multiple other sectors.
‘Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience’ in Bristol, 2022.
The highly-valued concept of immersivity has governed artistic practices for centuries, as embodied by various early-modern frescoes such as Andrea Pozzo’s ‘The Glory of St Ignatius’ (1688-1694) in Sant-Ignazio Church. Skilful illusions of three-dimensionality have been sought after as a way of engaging viewers more extensively; in fact, art as a medium itself often serves to extend reality in this way. The ‘Trompe L’Oeil’ technique used in frescoes like these makes the intricate artwork appear three-dimensional, and consequently immerses the viewer, captures their total undistracted attention, and distorts their physical viewpoint. Digital technologies can take processes like these even further, and not only facilitate immersive viewing but actually immersive participation - in a way mostly unmatched by analogue creative endeavours. For example, immersive virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) experiences, in a similar and yet arguably a more participatory way to analogue artworks, also extend reality (a phenomenon known as ‘extended reality’).
‘The Glory of St Ignatius’ seventeenth-century fresco by Andrea Pozzo in Sant-Ignazio Church, Rome.
‘Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience’ embodies this digital potential to immerse and empower audiences through extending reality - with its digital resuscitation of iconic artworks, agentive VR experience, and merging of tangible and intangible artistic worlds. Rather than changing Vincent van Gogh’s well-known paintings, this immersive digitised environment extends what is already there. The first part of the exhibition melds a hybrid world of the digital and the analogue; this begins to extend reality, and in doing so bridges centuries. Harnessing digital mediums, the exhibition narrated the artist’s life story and career in new ways. In the next room, ‘The Bedroom’ (1888) painting is brought to life in a more tangible and textual way - enabling audiences to literally move within an otherwise two-dimensional artwork. The exhibition continues to narrate Van Gogh’s artistic inspiration, and in particular the French Japonisme craze which the artist was highly captivated by. Interestingly, at this point in the exhibition, viewers were provided with Japanese green tea as a way of enhancing their immersive experience; multisensory engagement has extensive potential in cultural immersion, and facilitates more active public participation in exhibition concepts. This contributes to what is known, in both digital and analogue senses, as a ‘complete environment’ - and this empowered all-encompassing atmosphere is taken even further in the following part of the exhibition.
‘Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience’ in Bristol, 2022.
In a video on the exhibition’s website, a visitor makes the point, when asked to describe the immersive experience, that “you don’t feel like you’re just sitting there looking at old art, but you actually feel like you’re a part of it”. Though the material recreation of ‘The Bedroom’ contributed to this immersion, reality is truly extended in the central room of the exhibition with the use of digital technologies. Here, a vast number of Van Gogh’s paintings are brought to life on the walls of a large open space, against the backdrop of emotive instrumental music - totally surrounding audiences, and visually providing individuals with interpretative choices and agency. The digital recreations and animations of his artworks, especially with moving (and in some cases, even melting) paintings, are hypnotic; they provide a truly immersive sense of being inside a painting. On entering this large space, pretty much everyone is so immersed in the captivating digital extension of Van Gogh’s artistic reality that mobile phones cannot be seen - a rare sight at exhibitions. This digitised immersive experience, coupled with an emotive storytelling narrative, encourages the public to perceive art in a new way by approaching it with new perspectives and points of view (both physically and mentally). It is this process which successfully breaks down typical art versus viewer barriers; given that perspectives and approaches to these digital recreations are highly fluid, there is a two-way participatory and empowered dynamic in digitised ‘complete environment’ experiences like these. Extending this, the exhibition concludes with a highly participatory art and colouring space (allowing individuals to become more direct participants of the experience through independently remediating Van Gogh’s artworks), and a VR experience. This VR experience enables audiences to explore and embody the 360-degree landscapes which inspired the artist’s work - and although it does not facilitate total public control over the experience (for logistical design reasons), it allows individuals to look in any direction they like.
‘Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience’ in Bristol, 2022
‘Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience’ in Bristol, 2022
Still from the Virtual Reality aspect of ‘Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience’.
Similar interactive digital technology has been used to remediate and bring to life Gustav Klimt’s iconic artworks, such as with the 2018 VR experience ‘Klimt’s Magic Garden’ (in which audiences can literally enter into, and explore, Klimt’s aesthetic world), and Cuseum’s AR three-dimensional remediation of Klimt’s ‘The Tree of Life’ (which uses Apple ARKit to place the tree in the real world and allow it to be interacted with). In a similar way, AR has been used to create the ‘David Bowie Is’ (2019) exhibition app which enables anyone to “explore” David Bowie museum content in “the intimacy of [their] own environment, without glass barriers or crowds of visitors”. StoryTrails have recently harnessed VR to achieve a similar democratisation of public engagement in artistic histories - by producing various exploratory, immersive, and interactive VR experiences to extend historical realities such as that of the UK’s punk subculture of the 1970s (‘Get Punked!’ by Visualise) and the rise of Bhangra in the same decade (‘Off the Record’ by No Ghost). Digital extensions of reality therefore evidently enable public audiences to independently explore artistic histories in their own way, and in their own uninterrupted, empowered, personal spaces. Reality can also be extended digitally in these ways in the more conventional gallery spaces; the MoMAR app, for example, aims to “democratise physical exhibition spaces, museums, and the curation of art within them” by using AR to overlay alternative art onto existing artworks housed in museums and gallery spaces internationally.
Still from Cuseum’s Augmented Reality remediation of Gustav Klimt’s ‘Tree of Life’.
Still from ‘David Bowie Is’ app.
British Museum Augmented Reality.
Extending reality through digitised immersive experiences has extensive potential in transforming art spaces; immersive digital technologies facilitate greater public participation, individuals’ empowerment and agency, multisensory engagement, and international accessibility. Although the value of analogue two-dimensional art cannot be underestimated, and certainly should continue to be exhibited, extending these material realities fundamentally transforms the artistic experience and facilitates a shift from static, monologic, and hegemonically-prescribed interpretations of artworks - ultimately breaking down conventional artistic barriers of ‘us versus them’. This utility, power, and potential of digital technologies extends beyond the arts, and into museums (the British Museum, for example, has recently created an AR app for use when exploring their collections), heritage, science, design, manufacturing, healthcare, journalism, and so on. This leaves us questioning, then, is this empowered extension of reality actually our new and all-encompassing reality?
