Esse arts + opinions is a bilingual contemporary art magazine publishing primarily critical analyses and essays on current artistic practices. Submissions for the thematic section (1,500 to 2,000 words maximum) must be sent in DOCX or RTF format to [email protected] by September 1, 2025. Please include a short biographical notice (35 words) as well as your e-mail and mailing address. Persons wishing to first submit a note of intent (250-500 words) are invited to do so before June 1, 2025. No notes of intent will be read after this date, but it is still possible to submit a final text by the issue deadline (September 1, 2025).

Immersivity has emerged in recent years as a dominant theme of contemporary art exhibition and critical practice. One example of this is the large-scale “immersive experience” that presents the work of “great masters” through new technologies and multi-projector installations. Van Gogh, Da Vinci, Klimt, and Dali are just a few of the artists who have been the subject of these augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) experiences. Other initiatives, such as those by the collective TeamLab, present immersive spaces as art. They occupy massive buildings and fill each room with what they call “body immersive” artworks: visitors might wade through pools of water, bounce on strange surfaces, or wander through a forest of blossoming plants. On the one hand, these examples point to questions of finance and capital; on the other hand, they raise philosophical questions about the impetus behind a broader movement toward immersion.

The COVID-19 pandemic left many museums and cultural institutions in a difficult financial state. As a result, there is growing pressure to integrate the booming billion-dollar art-entertainment industry into their programming. Access is a central question in these discussions. By blending technology, science, and art and by erasing distinctions between body and machine, between medium and message, between image and reality, we may also be able to break down barriers in contemporary art, which so many people of diverse economic and educational backgrounds feel locked out of.

Broadly speaking, to be immersed is to be absorbed in some condition, action, or interest. An alternate definition of the word—“dipping or plunging into water or other liquid, and transferred into other things”—points to its sensorial potential. Oliver Grau, the author of Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (2003), observes that artists have been experimenting with immersion in one form or another from time immemorial. We can trace the present-day trend back through the lineage of digital and new media art innovations, particularly in the 1960s, when participation and intervention began to grow in importance. VR and AR works frequently borrow the language of video games, presenting us with the illusion of agency: move left and right or zoom in and out to explore your environment. This supposed freedom within the all-encompassing environment enhances the immersion, or, as Grau writes, “Interactivity challenges both the distinction between creator and observer as well as the status of an artwork and the function of exhibitions.” Immersive works require not only the active participation of the public but also a spatial experience that overwhelms the senses in ways that challenge the tradition of aesthetic distance, upending theories that argue that distance ensures criticality. Some warn that immersion increases emotional investment, while depriving users of critical distance.

Our attention is solicited in every direction by an endless onslaught of information and of multiple climate and sociopolitical crises. Total immersion is therefore appealing as a way to tune out the noise and have a pure experience with art. The critic and historian Hal Foster warns of the political danger of spectacular art producing disorientation rather than critical reflection. Do these blockbuster exhibitions promote accessible forms of public engagement with the canon of Western art, or do they simply capitalize on the attention economy’s modes of fragmentation and capture? Conversely, is immersion necessarily an uncritical image space?

For this issue, Esse arts + opinions is seeking texts about all forms of immersion in contemporary art and theory. How are artists critically engaging with immersive technologies? Conversely, what kinds of practices are rejecting technology in their pursuit of immersion? Is there some aspect of the immersive that recalls the aesthetic ideals of gesamtkunstwerk, wherein architecture, art, music, and language are combined in service of the art? How are these experiences breaking down the ever-present boundaries among spectator, body, and art?

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