THE IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE (2023)

A virtual reality installation created as part of my Immersive Media Design coursework. Developed with Blender, Photoshop, and Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline, Shader Graph, and XR Interaction Toolkit. Read part of the project proposal I submitted for class below.

SHORT PROJECT DESCRIPTION

The Immersive Experience is a VR critique of the “immersive public domain” art genre. Upon putting on the headset, the player finds themself in a dark hallway covered with flyers for the fictional Immersive Alphonse Mucha, not to be confused with the Alphonse Mucha Immersive Experience, not to be confused with the Mucha: The Immersive Exhibit. In virtual reality, players watch the art-nouveau paintings of Alphonse Mucha come to life on the walls, supplemented by public domain recordings of dramatic classical music. Once they’ve had enough they exit into a hallway covered with flyers for the Immersive O’Keefe, continuing in the next room. And so on, and so on. Immersive Monet, Immersive Picasso, and of course, Immersive Van Gogh… as they wander from room to room, the player has the option to exit once they’ve had enough.

It ends, of course, in a gift shop. In this room, the player learns the full name of the project: Are You Bored Yet?: The Immersive Experience. The game keeps track of how many rooms they went through to present their final score: Congratulations! You went through 7 experiences without getting bored.

SIGNIFICANCE AND DISTINCTION

Imagine Van Gogh: The Immersive Exhibition was directed by Annabelle Mauger and first showcased in France in 2008. This exhibition leaves Van Gogh’s oil paintings relatively unaltered: they are projected onto room-scale screens in the style of a PowerPoint, full-screen static images with simple fade transitions. There is the occasional zoom-in for detail, the occasional Ken Burns-style pan. But in 2021, a surge of unrelated replicas emerged, including Beyond Van Gogh, Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience, and The Original Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit (not-so-original after all). These exhibits provide more or less the same experience, but modify the paintings to animate.

Mauger, the self-proclaimed “mother of immersive exhibitions,” remarked that the alterations were “unconscionable” for manipulating the long-dead artist’s original intent. For a similar reason, Ella Feldman critiques the “immersive” Mexican Geniuses: A Frida and Diego Experience in the Washington City Paper. After watching their reanimation as borderline-racist CGI caricatures, their paintings reduced to “aesthetically pleasing desktop screensaver[s],” she wonders if Kahlo and Rivera are “rolling over in their graves.”

Immersive installations of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Fredensrich Hundertwasser have now toured the world, but artists and journalists are now realizing how boring and even disrespectful these experiences are. My project satirizes the fad of exploiting public domain artworks as a cash grab and points out how repetitive each “immersive” iteration is. Put on the headset and consume as many “immersive experiences” as you desire, free and in the comfort of your own chair—and just as good as the real thing.