Have we reached peak immersive art?

Frameless’ creative director Ryan ‘Woody’ Atwood describes their venue – which opened in 2022 and includes 50 laser projections and, somehow, 158 loudspeakers – not just as an immersive event space but a "cultural experience".

“At a time when digital technology is transforming and accelerating every aspect of our lives, I believe immersive art has added to the art movement,” he says. For Atwood, immersive shows act “as a gateway into the art world, immersive art complements traditional galleries, sparking enthusiasm for the art movement and inspiring a desire to explore original masterpieces”. Frameless, he says, bridges even the gaps between “personality types”. The experience is meant to be emotional, ageless, genderless, utopian. “Art,” he says, “is truly a universal language.” It’s… a bit much.

For all Atwood’s hyperbole though, it’s certainly true that immersive events have offered creatives, galleries and production companies the opportunity to merge different artforms in ways that were never possible before. In a traditional gallery setting, video pieces are often relegated to a side-room and often, as a result, sadly overlooked. In an immersive setting video work can be incorporated alongside more traditional mediums; in the case of Sphere in Las Vegas, audiences have been able to experience music and experiential video art combined in a totally innovative way (albeit, sadly, through the conduit of U2). The team at Treatment Studio, responsible for the production, spent six weeks selecting pieces to go alongside each song in the set. “It feels vast on a level beyond anything I’ve experienced before,” producer Lizzie Pocock says. “It’s almost as big as an arena but it feels somehow intimate, like every audience member is really close to you. The audience becomes part of it, in a way, and that’s kind of magical.”

Our rush towards the immersive in recent years could possibly be explained as part of that need for intimacy, connection, communal experiences. After the pandemic isolated us all inside our homes and forced us to integrate our lives with our technology more than ever, it makes sense that we want to return to group experiential moments. “[There’s] a real desire for audiences to have a communal experience,” says Alexandra Payne, creative director at Outernet. “There was a concern in the arts and culture world that after Covid nobody was going to want to do that anymore, and that there would be that real seismic shift that was already occurring to just consume art on your tablet or on your phone. I think what these immersive experiential spaces are showing us is that that's not necessarily what people want. They want to come down and experience something in person. People want to share that – not just on their social media is, which, of course, is a big part of the experience, but it’s about sharing it with loved ones and friends and family members that you’re coming with.”

Yes, it all sounds lovely. The caveat here is financial, of course. Although London’s Outernet immersive experience is free, many other immersive shows are ticketed, and often eye-wateringly expensive. Prices for U2 at Sphere start at $140 (not including your travel to Las Vegas if you don’t already live in Vegas, and who lives in Vegas?). Tickets for Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors at Tate Modern may start at £10, but competition is high to actually get them. David Hockney’s Bigger and Closer at Lightroom is similarly often sold out. If you can find a day to go, single tickets are around £30. Tickets for Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience were about £20 a pop for adults, and a further £11.50 for children.

It’s worth noting, too, that plenty of these exhibitions do feel geared towards families, being an entry point to introduce children to art – if you can afford it. And even if you can, it means galleries are suddenly flooded with toddlers and children with short attention spans, even shorter than the zoomers and millennials with brains fried by their phones. Still though, in spite of the price points, those ticketed events sell out again and again. And people go to them again and again; you can tell, they’re on your FYP, or your Instagram grid. These immersive experiences, after all, are geared towards the gram – the number of views can attest to that.

There is, though, for all the accessibility that immersive exhibitions offer, something antithetical to the experience of being moved by a piece of art when in the back of our minds we’re thinking about how many likes we might get for it on social media. Immersive events which actively encourage selfies and photo opportunities risk detracting from the art itself; a depressing natural end-point to queues to take photos in front of the Mona Lisa and cameras being banned from Basquiat’s recent exhibition in London. Although cameras could never be conceivably banned from the grid-ready world of immersive art, it’s a fine line to treat between posting too much too; leaving your exhibition open to an ‘Instagram vs Reality’ takedown, or revealing spoilers. In the case of Sphere, organisers briefly considered asking guests to put stickers over their phone cameras before realising that their footage is as much promotion as it is a leak.

But mirror selfies and TikToks from concerts are going nowhere, and neither, it seems, are immersive exhibitions and events. In London this month alone there’s Outernet’s The Butterfly Trail, a “magical mixed reality experience”; Beyond Reality, an absurdist, Dali-inspired production at Frameless, a “permanent multi-sensory experience” based in Marble Arch; and Dopamine Land, a Brompton Road based immersive event meant to make us happy, to name just a few. There are so many immersive pop-ups that even the gallerists and producers themselves are getting sick of it. Lizzie Pocock tells me almost every brief she’s received for the past five years has used the word “immersive”, a term she now calls “overused”. “I don't want to sort of be disrespectful, but so many things that get called immersive, you still sort of just go and watch,” she says. “You don't feel like you're in them, or you're affected by them. It's almost a bit of a lazy word, a buzzword, isn't it? It's like, let's do something that's immersive. It’s perhaps an excuse to not really delve into sort of the deeper experience and the deeper reason for why you're putting it live.”

If the people behind the immersive shows are getting sick of them, then perhaps we finally have reached peak immersive. Now we just have to wait for audiences to catch up, for the algorithm to get bored, and for the art world to determine what their next lucrative buzzword will be. Personally, my money’s on AI.