Aesthetics of Immersion in Interactive Immersive Installation: Phenomenological Case Study

Aesthetics of Immersion in Interactive Immersive Installation: Phenomenological Case Study

(Long paper)

Keywords: Immersive installation, aesthetics of immersion, immersive Consciousness, audio-visual, case study.

This paper examines the aesthetics of immersive experience in Light Strings, an interactive immersive environment. One of prominent aspects of Interactive Art is the notion of immersion. The concept of immersion is generally defined as a viewer “forgetting” the real world outside of the virtual environment and by a sense of being in a make-believe world generated by computational hardware and software. As an interactive artist and researcher, I conceive of immersion as any experience where integrated bodily, conscious, and pre-conscious states thoroughly intertwine with the world. Moreover immersion is where mind, body and environment interweave and communicate with each other inside of technically-mediated, spatially enclosed, and sensuously-interactive computational environments. Light Strings was created based on my previous art practice and research into immersion as a way to study participants’ experiences with the artwork. In the participant study of Light Strings, participants were encouraged to describe the felt experiences of the installation through phenomenologically oriented research methods. As a result, an experiential model of the participants’ experiences was developed by exploring bodily, spatial, and contextual consciousness with temporal considerations.