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Immersion

The last feature to be addressed in relation to interactivity is immersion. As suggested earlier, immersion as sinking into a fantasy world is often held to be incompatible with interactivity brought to conscious awareness. However, the very notion of a poetics of media art suggests that immersion and interactivity are far from incompatible or inversely proportional. Here, three examples of self-consciously immersive art will be addressed.

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In contrast to this analytic and deconstructive piece, Char Davies's two virtual-reality pieces suggest the experience of diving into a fully immersive virtual world. A harness interface allows the visitor use her breath to navigate up or down in virtual space. Used in conjunction with a headmounted display, the interface evokes diving gear. I have discussed my experience in a virtual pond within Osmose (1993) at some length in Virtualities. I was amazed at how different the experience of being inside Davies's subsequent virtual world, Ephémère (1998), would be. The virtual worlds to be navigated in Osmose were distinguished by an aesthetic of transparency and their delicate figurative rendering of the natural world. In contrast, Ephémère was like entering a virtual abstract painting that suggested variously a landscape or the interior of a human body or some microscopic view of plant life. Navigating this abstract space had none of the qualities of ground-covering speed I had experienced in Osmose. Because there was no secure index of scale, I experienced virtual space as a more contemplative temporal flow. The interface and user of Ephémère was visible to spectators in a darkened theater as a shadow on a translucent screen. Not only could every navigational act be followed like a shadow play; a monocular view of the virtual world in the head-mounted display was projected on-screen in real time. Thus, it was possible to discover differences in navigational style that reflected different movement personalities and that consequently revealed different territories within the virtual realm. In this way, the difference between these two pieces was as significant and revealing as the pieces seen individually.

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