MASTERS THESIS: Situating the Immersive Experience: Exploring Intermedial Situations in Art/Cinema Installations (original) (raw)
Intermediality as an Aesthetic of Immersive Theatre
2017
Immersive theatre is an exciting and dynamic art form which emerged as a popular new theatre practice in 1980s, stemming from the combination of installation art, physical and visual theatre practices (Machon, 2013: xv). The research for this dissertation is twofold. Secondary research is in the form of a comprehensive literature review which analyses previous writing and journals published on intermediality and immersive theatre. Primary research came from an online survey held from July to August of 2017 to discover the attitudes towards the art form. The results from these studies are discussed and summarised. This dissertation questions how contemporary theatre companies create dynamic and stimulating performance works for today’s audiences. It aims to discover how many people attend performances such as those known as ‘immersive’ (to completely surround or fully involve an audience) or ‘site-specific’ (performance work created specifically for a space or place). It will address the issues of intermediality and immersive performance art and how soundscapes can be created to fully involve audiences in work which is relevant to the political and cultural climate of the twenty-first century. The dissertation will reference the work of Living Structures, Smoosh & Smoosh and Heiner Goebbels with a heavy emphasis on exploring the music used within selected pieces of work. This dissertation will argue that there is significance for an immersive music theatre synthesis which is reflected through ticket sales and performances produced in Britain. It will reflect upon how music theatre art can become a catalyst for opening accessibility to work previously viewed as ‘high art’. The area of study spans the last two centuries. It finds that we are in danger of losing sight of seeing immersive theatre technique as ‘art’ but instead they are becoming fully sellable products which are more like attractions than reasons to tell a story. We may also have to rely on big name brands to help support our work as artists as immersive theatre may or may not be a popular form of theatre. The main body of this dissertation is contained in chapter five where there is a discussion how intermediality is used within immersive theatre and to what extent. The chapter also discusses whether intermediality could be viewed as an aesthetic of immersive (music) theatre.
Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 2014
With Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance, Josephine Machon has written a useful and very necessary book. It is the first monograph that is solely devoted to immersive theatre, a phenomenon of huge popularity, which has nonetheless given both critics and scholars a hard time to pin down and to conceptualise (Remshardt; White; White). Machon's book sets out to fill this lacuna. The study is divided into two parts, of which the first one provides definitional approaches to immersive theatre, traces its theatrical heritage and offers theoretical models for its understanding. The second part is a sourcebook of interviews with eleven leading practitioners in the field of immersive theatre. Right from the beginning, Machon acknowledges the diversity of performative practices that have been called immersive, ranging from small-scale one-onone performances to the epic worlds of Punchdrunk. Consequently, finding a binding and striking definition is impossible, but certain common characteristics can be identified (xvi). For Machon, the pivotal point of these is a multi-sensorial, physical experience that provides room for interaction: "[I]mmersive experiences in theatre combine the act of immersionbeing submerged in an alternative medium where all the senses are engaged and manipulated-with a deep involvement in the activity within that medium" (21-22). Immersive practices, for Machon, are a counter-movement against a virtual society that is characterised by social networks and second hand encounters. Immersive theatre offers real sensate experience through sensual stimulation (26). This approach is obviously highly problematic as it is laden with essentialist notions. However, she argues that all forms of immersive theatre are specifically designed to give thick, bodily experiences that speak to all the senses. The physical presence of the audience within the performance (she calls it praesence, seeking to engulf all the sensorial impressions) leads to a privileged experience that is stronger than conventional theatre and will last longer in one's body's memory (44). Immersion is then defined by three categories: absorption (fully engaged in terms of imagination and concentration), transportation (a world that is both a mindspace like in a video game but also a real physical space), and total immersion (praesence) (62-63). Immersive theatre, according to Machon, can be used as
Shifting Immediations: Fields of Experience across Media Art and Design
ISEA proceedings 2020. Why Sentience? , 2020
This paper explores the concept of fields of experience as a way to engage with the conditions of emergence of what we might call sentience. As a process of fielding, sensation and processes of sense-making are of an emergent and entangled quality in the overall ecology of experience. We specifically wish to emphasize the dynamics of the closely interrelated conditions for sensing and sense-making – what we conceptualize as ‘shifting immedations’ - and its affective politics. Rather than transgression, ‘shifting’ foregrounds the sometimes almost imperceptible reorientations of fields of experience that are lived immediately as tendencies and vectors for change (feeling the non-sensuous). In particular, we wish to zoom in on specific practices and technologies that might modulate and reorient such experiential fields. We do so by analyzing two cases that emphasize the emergent relations between digital and interactive technologies and their fielding potential; BERMUDA is an interactive installation that attempts to relay affective intensity into tendencies for collective action, whereas the interventions of etcetera emphasize time-sensitive modulations of experience. Exploring these cases, we ask how experiential fields and shifting immediations might allow us to think and act towards new forms of engaging in a politics of sentience beyond the human subject.
Body, Space & Technology, 2011
This paper proposes reflections of an ongoing nature about the relationship of sound, image, and movement in art. Following a range of productions from stage choreographies to dance films, CD-ROMs and interactive-generative installations to videoclips and multimedia scenographies for dance and music, practical experience has shown that what may be seen as standard and complimentary elements of much contemporary interdisciplinary creation, in fact prove to offer a gamut of very different creative potentialities with each new project. This said, the question of interdisciplinary practice has also been occulted in recent years by artistic fervour and fascination surrounding digital productions that propose "new" sensorial experiences. While artists and critics alike are keen to assert how it is the technologies themselves that are responsible for "augmenting", "embodying" or "interfacing" sensorial experiences in art, the basic configuration of sound, image, and movement nevertheless remains a constitutive parameter of most productions, be they specifically digital, interactive, generative or not. Revisiting the nature of interdisciplinary creation today can be approached from various angles, for example, from the point of view of new spatial and temporal propositions or new hybridities in art. This paper chooses to look at interdisciplinarity from the perspective of intersensoriality, immersion and environment, taking as its principal reference Paroles trouvées, an installation I created in 2007 with French composer Dominique Besson and scenographer Olivier Koechlin. Conceived as a composite work involving three intertwined scores, musical, videochoreographical and optical, the interdisciplinary elements here combine in a novel way in the work's reception. Highlighting theoretical and practical issues of relevance and referring to a selection of immersive works in a brief historical overview, the paper also addresses questions of scoring, presence, interiority, texture, scale, intertextuality, and vibration.
Temporary public art interventions are a relatively common sight in western cities, but whatever claims public artists may make about the social significance of their artworks, these are rarely documented or analyzed in any systematic social-scientific way. This paper presents our analysis of one artistic intervention, the Situated Cinema, a custom-made demountable structure (http://vimeo.com/52432509) that moved to a different public space each day for the four days of WNDX, Winnipeg’s Festival of Moving Image, showing a loop of five two-minute films in the genre of city symphonies. Through the semi-serendipitous interview and observation methods of what we call ‘pop-up ethnography’, we critically examine the contrasts in perspectives of each group of social actors involved in the project: filmmakers, designers, members of the public and us, the urban anthropologists. We discuss 1) the tension between the social and aesthetic properties of the sites where the Situated Cinema was installed; 2) ‘artistically literate’ versus ‘layperson’ viewers’ experiences of the Cinema; 3) the inspiration and constraints that filmmakers found in the Cinema’s structure, and 4) the ways in which artists’ and social scientists’ goals, methods and expectations vis-à-vis urban public art can diverge, which call into question the compatibility of the two fields.
2019
If we subscribe to a notion of place as an intersection of social, economic and political relations, rather than a bounded geographic location, where and how does artistic engagement with the context of the exhibition start? How do such works coalesce to form a meaningful ‘exhibitionʼ for the biennial visitor when the experience of place itself is an event in progress? ... And furthermore, how do context-specific projects and artworks become meaningful outside the signifying context of the exhibition?
"Perceptual Moment", MFA thesis, Emily Carr University
Moving image art can provide unique possibilities for making sense of our surrounding reality. Consisting of a series of artworks produced through a creative research methodology, this thesis project explores wonderment and its role in visual perception. The series, Perceptual Moments, is comprised of short, evocative video works presented in a variety of modes including interactive and sculptural installation. To question the role of vision in mediating reality, the works engage the viewer through an intensive experience of seeing. This accompanying essay explores key visual and editing devices in the series that appear to have a role in shaping the viewer’s perception and interpretation of the visual experience, including “the chasm,” “the blur” and “interactive installation.” The essay also investigates the motivation behind the works through journal entries and offers critical analyses for each production. The visual devices in question are grounded within the context of psychology, neuroscience, phenomenology and film theories. Philosopher Gaston Bachelard provides an anchor for the concept of wonderment, while theorists Jonathan Crary and Gilles Deleuze create dialogical space around the act of viewing filmic images and the affect that it involves. The devices are also observed in other media works, including seminal pieces by Stan Brackhage, Kurt Kren and Jan Svankmajer as well as contemporary figures such as Nathalie Djurberg and Matt Hope.
Aesthetic Experiences of Presence
Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University, 2019
This study investigates viewing experiences that came with the introduction of cinema. Merging (film) history with aesthetic theory, this dissertation entails historically informed theoretical reconstructions of viewing experiences between 1896 and 1898. During this novelty period, projected moving pictures evoked a wide array of reactions: on the one hand, early cinema was an extraordinary and astonishing attraction while, on the other hand, it was deeply rooted in daily life and everyday perception. To contemporary audiences, early moving pictures presented an unevenness hovering between amazement and contemplation. This study argues that the cinematograph, the vitascope, and other animated-picture attractions were popular at this early stage because they immediately appealed to the senses. These sensations are subsequently discussed as effects of presence. Early moving-picture exhibitions, moreover, can be seen as performances involving spectators in a play with presence vis-à-vis absence. While moving-picture attractions had an immediate impact on the viewer's body as situated in the "here and now" of the auditorium, the pictures presented places and objects that were irrevocably inaccessible and absent. Exploring different viewing situations in two different contexts, the current study therefore proposes the aesthetic experience of presence as a framework to understand these various late 19th-century viewing experiences. The three chapters of this dissertation are organized separately around the concepts of intermediality, movement, and space. Chapter 1 proposes that, in the context of fairgrounds in the Netherlands, early cinema's "intermedial enmeshing" is a probable cause for the aesthetic experience of presence. This chapter employs the concept of intermediality to outline how the kinematograph attraction caused both a semantically rich as well as a sensuously multivalent experience. It then presents a detailed study of the activities and attractions of the showman Henri Grünkorn before he exhibited "Electric Cinematograph." Chapter 1 also investigates the various layers of discourse involved in Aladin ou la lampe merveilleuse (1897), a series of scenes exhibited by Grünkorn that was popular with local audiences at the time. Chapter 2 focuses on the experience of movement. Through a close study of the introduction of moving images in the context of Chicago in 1896 and 1897, it proposes that moving pictures presented a radically familiar form of motion. It was familiar in the sense that it brought together a number of constellations of motion and energy fundamental to modernity. Situating moving images in the rhythms of the city allows us to conceptualize the spectator as physically engaged with the motion of the kinematograph. Chapter 3 studies the paradox of proximity and distance and discusses moving-picture attractions as they were introduced in vaudeville and popular theater in Chicago. It describes the different constellations between screen and live performance from a spatial perspective while focusing on the representation of bodies. In many ways, the paradox of nearness and distance allowed for a spatially oriented play with presences. The study concludes with a discussion on the potential and challenges of including presence effects in film-historical research on viewing experiences in early cinema and beyond.