Immersive art on the rise

Spectators can become a drop of water dripping down a tree, live a transformative experience through fiction to heal childhood trauma, participate in a story through motor movements or enter a virtual space through breathing. Immersive art has an infinite number of expressions, but it always seeks to fully involve the subject in what they are experiencing. "The best type of immersion is always the one that can put the person inside the piece of art or story they are looking into," explained Pau Alsina, a member of the UOC's Faculty of Arts and Humanities. Nowadays, thanks to greater accessibility and advances in digital technologies that emphasize the creation of increasingly daring virtual realities, this type of art is enjoying a resurgence.

The enormous difference with the 1990s, the time of the first great boom and experimentation with immersive creation, is that we have gone from facing huge costs to a situation in which technologies have become inclusive and cheaper. "Head-mounted displays are now nowhere near as large and fragile as they used to be and their ready availability means that they are practically everywhere," explained Pau Alsina. However, some people still decry that they are not yet fully democratized and there is still a long way to go until these kinds of devices can reach people other than the wealthy classes of the first world.

To overcome the cost problems of individual devices, there is a type of immersive art that reaches the public through large facilities. Earlier this year, France's largest museum collection, the Réunion des Musées Nationaux announced a new Grand Palais Immersif as a space "specializing in the production, operation and dissemination of digital exhibitions." The project was undoubtedly originated by increased demand for digital exhibitions and their success among audiences not usually found at art venues.

An example of this is the Atelier des Lumières, France's first digital art centre, which after opening in Paris in 2018 managed to attract some 2.5 million visitors to its exhibitions before the pandemic hit. The Atelier has become a must for immersive art lovers, and stunning exhibitions have been held there, such as 'Monet, Renoir, Chagall... Journeys Around the Mediterranean', 'Colours X Colours', 'Terra Magnifica', 'Dreamed Japan' and 'Van Gogh, the Starry Night'.

In Barcelona, one of the most successful events of recent times was the recent 'Klimt, the Immersive Experience', held at the IDEAL Digital Arts Centre with large immersive projections, more than 1,000 square meters of screens, virtual reality headsets, exhibition spaces and other interactive tools. The event, created by Layers of Reality and the Belgian studio Exhibition Hub, was held simultaneously in Barcelona and Brussels. We will have to wait until it closes on 17 November for the final attendance figures, but between April and the end of September it had already been visited by 120,000 people. 'Klimt' is the third large-format event at the centre, which has already welcomed more than 300,000 visitors since it first opened its doors in November 2019. The previous experience, based around the figure of Claude Monet, received nearly 150,000 visitors, while the pioneering 'Barcelona Photographic Memory' was visited by 40,000 people despite the impact on capacity and opening schedules brought about by the Covid-19 crisis.

Around the world, art groups such as the Japanese teamLab continue to enjoy spectacular popularity and mass appeal, and have also successfully taken different forms through events such as the teamLab Planets physical museum and the digital event teamLab Borderless. An exhibition by this group will be held at the CaixaForum in Barcelona until January 2022.

The UOC, from research to practice in the relationship between art, science and technology

And what is the UOC's role in this booming trend? The University has been working for some time to take on an interdisciplinary structure through teams from different faculties to deal with these issues in an orderly manner. "We are approaching this from the most reflective, theoretical and analytical perspective," stated Alsina. "We have been publishing articles in the digital magazine Artnodes on virtual reality and digital arts for 20 years, and we have a good number of researchers working in this area. The teaching of immersive art is split in a cross-disciplinary manner into various bachelor's and master's degrees," he added.

As to practice, the University is organizing ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art) for 2022, with virtual reality and artificial intelligence as priority lines of work. "It will be a highlight of the year and a very interesting event, as Barcelona will welcome artists from all over the world to exhibit and explain their developments in this area," said Alsina.

The UOC is also one of the driving forces behind Hac Te, a hub created to explore the intersections between art, science and technology. One of its aims is to strengthen the digital transformation of society both in large facilities and for individuals.

One of the most interesting creation-related contributions was provided last April by Joan Soler-Adillon, a member of the UOC's Faculty of Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunications. He is one of the co-creators of the virtual reality and interactivity artistic project The Smallest of Worlds, which uses virtual reality headsets to immerse viewers in a three-dimensional space of strange proportions, made of pieces of interiors of homes from around the world captured during the Covid-19 lockdown.

The opinion of this artist is that, when it comes to interactive, animated or immersive projects, "very simple ideas often work better." "Sometimes you try to do very technologically advanced things, adding extremely complicated artificial intelligence systems, and the public doesn't appreciate that complexity, because it ends up being lost," he said. Additionally, he said it is important not to fall into the discourse of technological determinism, according to which it is technology that marks out the way. In short, he concluded, "as artists, we have to get used to working with tools that are not designed for us and adapt to devices such as certain types of computers and headsets."

What will the future of virtual reality bring? 

If the experts agree on one thing, it is that we are at a turning point that will be interesting to study closely. Having overcome the major experiments of the 1990s and the disproportionate enthusiasm of five years ago – with some people predicting that the immersive experience would make other art forms disappear – this type of proposal is now considered to have become just another part of the art world, one that may be here to stay. "I think it will simply end up being another way of telling stories," said Soler-Adillon.

"There is some risk that people will get tired if we focus everything on having to buy a new device every year, at the same pace as smartphones," noted the artist, "but it is generally an interesting time to see if virtual reality will carve out a commercial niche for videogames or whether it will take off more widely." In addition, we must closely study the effects of the pandemic and lockdown, which have resulted in a social need to move away from all things virtual and return to face-to-face experiences.