The Immersivity of Art in the Digital Age. Augmented Reality as a New Form of Art Exhibiting (original) (raw)

The words like “Augmented Reality”, “Immersion” and “Interaction” are kept being used in promoting the entertainment services. To make classical art more attractive to the public, these technologies are also implemented in the museums and galleries. By transforming an analogue art work and putting it into the digital world these institutions expect to create the effect of gamification and therefore make the perception of art easier and smoother. But if we take a look on the artistic strategies, we may see that the idea of immersivity was never about making art easy to consume. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, one of the meaning of immersivity is “the absorbing involvement”. In context of art, it means spectator enters the reality of the art work. The laws of this reality reveal themselves gradually and, if we talk about modern and contemporary art, which has left behind the attempt to reproduce the reality, are much different from those that the spectator is used to. For unveiling of these laws artists for ages have used different tools, both in terms of form and content, like polychorality in Renaissance church music, Kurt Schwitter’s “Merzbau” installation, Brecht’s “Verfremdungseffekt” in theatre etc. Development of technologies has opened new possibilities of creating the immersivity via the art form. Nevertheless, according to Heidegger, purpose of technology is the storage of resources and commodities. And the museums can be regarded as a technology of preserving artworks by aestheticising them, giving a contemplative nature. However, as Boris Groys argues in his article “Art, Technology, Humanism”, art is gradually transforming from an object of contemplation into the action. Thus, with this change the old exhibiting and curating practices are becoming obsolete and one should look for a new way of presenting art that will fit the contemporary state of it and the one of spectators as well. Use of Augmented Reality technology can facilitate the merge of reality of spectator and the digital reality of an artwork. To demonstrate this use case of Augmented Reality (AR), I have created the virtual exhibition “I am not here for you”, that consists of 6 audio and 1 visual artworks, and is dedicated to the topic of a role of women in the urban space. This concept together with the way of being presented works on making the spectator perceive the relation of the environment to the topic brought up in the artworks. The exhibition is available via the mobile application that uses the phone’s camera interface to detect the location surrounding the spectator and placing the artworks around. After trying out this format of exhibition, collecting the opinions of its spectators and connecting the outcome with the theoretical research done beforehand, I came to conclusion that virtual exhibitions are beneficial in terms of accessibility, immersivity and preventing the mediation of digital artwork by the physical object. But it remains to be the risk that the technology itself can distract from the purpose it is used for.