The Art of Immersion II

Immersion is an essential feature of all the forms of visualization used by the new media. With precursors in painted panoramas, Cinerama, and installation art, today’s immersive digital visualization systems, from panorama projections to virtual reality and augmented reality, have attained a new level and quality of transformational experience of reality — an advance that has been driven by the work of media artists from around the world.

The first part of »The Art of Immersion« presented a selection of important works, which were developed for the »Advanced Visualization and Interaction Environment« (AVIE) panorama projection which are to this day milestones in the conceptual and aesthetic development of contemporary immersive art. Now, in the second part of the exhibition, the ZKM | Karlsruhe continues its overview of the »art of immersive experiences« with artworks that were especially created for Sarah Kenderdine and Jeffrey Shaw’s multiscreen projection environment »ReACTOR«. »ReACTOR« is a new type of cinematographic apparatus, which enables multiperspectival image capture in 3D and in which selected scenes from movies, theater pieces and performances are recorded for the installation from several points of view. Thus the images, which are projected simultaneously on six screens arranged in a hexagon, achieve immersive depths and multiple perspectives, which fuses the real with the virtual space and gives the spectator an idea of the digital theater of the future.

»DOUBLE DISTRICT« is a work created by Saburo Teshigawara in 2008 in collaboration with Volker Kuchelmeister for the »ReACTOR«, in which several solo performances and duets are performed by Rihoko Sato together with the Japanese choreographer. Thanks to the multiple camera perspectives of the recording situations, the dancers perform without the limitations of a conventional frontal stage situation, and are free to orient their movements on an omnipresent virtual spectator within the space.

»FRAGMENTATION« is an eleven-minute excerpt from Robert Lepage’s nine-hour theater play LIPSYNCH, which was recorded in 2011 for »ReACTOR« before a performance of the play at the Théâtre Denise Pelletier in Montreal. For the »ReACTOR« production, ten cameras are set up at the five corners of a hexagon around the Canadian theater director’s stage set. The recorded images are projected on five screens in an orientation consistent with their camera angle. Together with the sixth screen, which shows the recordings from a rotating camera and its preset viewpoints, the projection device gives viewers the impression of moving around Lepage’s set by seeing reality from six distinct perspectives.