When is it possible to speak of an atmosphere in relation to the work of an artist? How do light and space, sound and image become concrete tools for designing space? And in what terms do we define a work as immersive?

The dialogues which open the conference at Pirelli HangarBicocca aim to address, through the experience of two artists who have exhibited in the museum in past years, in conversation with two scholars who have an in-depth knowledge of their work, some of the central themes of the debate on immersiveness in contemporary art, a key concept continually raised in the description of works, installations and exhibitions, and one which is at the same time full both of expressive possibilities and of critical problems.

In outlining a possible genealogy of immersive environments, a decisive stage can be identified in the kinetic-programmed research developed in Italy in the 1960s and in particular in the installations created, collectively or individually, by the exponents of Gruppo T in Milan (Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani, Gianni Colombo, Gabriele Devecchi, Grazia Varisco). An important part of their output consists in the creation of real environments which are characterised by a substantial technological component and aimed at stimulating the sensorial participation of the spectator through programmed effects of light, colour, sound and movement.

This contribution will examine the cultural and theoretical assumptions underlying these experiments, based on the concepts of integrated design, variability, dynamism and interactivity, and then will focus on the analysis on some emblematic works such as Spazio della stimolazione percettiva, a large-scale multimedia environment created in 1970 by Davide Boriani, Livio Castiglioni and Gabriele Devecchi for the 35th Venice Biennale.

This contribution offers a reflection on different types of exhibitions staged in recent years in the spaces of Pirelli HangarBicocca by means of a number of case studies, including the solo exhibitions dedicated to Cerith Wyn Evans, Matt Mullican, Leonor Antunes, Laure Prouvost, Trisha Baga, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, and Steve McQueen.

There are in fact various ways in which the public has been encouraged to adopt an immersive approach to the works exhibited at Pirelli HangarBicocca. If in some cases the display of the exhibition itself, conceived and designed by the curators and the artist, becomes a device in which the visitor is immersed, in others it is the individual works or installations which favour immersive experiences, as is the case with environments, film projections and virtual reality. This contribution offers a reflection on the entire process of staging an exhibition, from its conception, to the dialogue between artist and curator, and to the fashioning, through cultural mediation and the Public Program, of conditions which can multiply the possible points of view.

Active in the Italian art scene, as a painter and film-maker, since the Second World War, Marinella Pirelli (Verona 1925, Varese 2009) stands out for her constant work of investigation, which has led to pioneering results in the field of experimental cinema.  She learned the technique of film shooting and editing in the early 1950s thanks to her employment as an animation designer and through constant study of film history and technique. Throughout her work, meditation on the themes of light and movement is interwoven with an attention to the body, her own and that of the viewer, and to space, understood as a medium. In this context, some of Pirelli's most significant works are analysed, with particular attention to those which trigger a direct relationship with the theme of "immersiveness": from the films of the mid-1960s, to Film Ambiente of 1969, a walk-through film structure that underlines the artist's innovative contribution in the field of Expanded Cinema, to Pulsar, evocative environments generated by moving artificial light sources, designed and produced in the early 1970s. Starting from the exhibition which the Museo del Novecento dedicated to Marinella Pirelli in 2019, the complex theme of the re-enactment of historical installations with a "live" component will also be analysed.

How does an artwork express an “environmentality?” Can we redefine immersion, in critical terms, as a form of environmental projection? In taking up such questions from my latest book, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media, my talk addresses the relation between projection and environmentality in the visual arts in order to question immersivity.

Confronted with the phenomenon of environmentalization, we need to re-imagine the ecology of representation. Positing ecology as an environmental relation, I will consider its artistic imagination both historically and theoretically. I propose that we revisit the environmentality of media archaeology to understand how this impulse is furthered in current moving-image projections in the art gallery that call themselves immersive.

I will especially address environmentality as it relates to movement and scale, questioning the relation between immersion and magnification. I will advance my argument by presenting the large-scale moving-image installations of the Danish-born, New York artist Jesper Just. Does magnification always imply spectatorial immersion? I prefer to pursue other forms of experience that arise when confronting an ecology of scale in art. What else happens when we scale? Can immersion be understood, more critically, as a form of environmental absorption?

Finally, in recasting immersion in these environmental terms, I propose that we think of absorption as empathic projection. Empathy with space questions the relation between the human and the nonhuman. In shifting from the human subject’s own immersive identification to a more critically aware, enveloping field of empathic projection, we can discard the prevalent human-centric position that pervades most immersive discourses. A different ecology of immersivity rises to the surface by relating the empathic “projective imagination” to “atmospheric thinking.”

VR artworks transport the viewer into a different space-time and give shape to 360° story worlds. However, this is not an exclusive feature of these experiences: for example, the sensation of physical immersion that one feels when wearing a helmet is also a feature of installation art. Within this framework, artists can design abstract immersive experiences aimed at eliciting a physical, perceptual, and emotional reaction, while also telling a story. Sometimes artists leave clues or hints referring to the stories across the environment (be it analogue, digital or mixed); some others build real scripts linked to fictional characters or based on real/plausible events.

Analyzing several case studies, this paper aims at illustrating some of the most compelling critical issues related to the relationship between environmental installation, virtual environments, and the construction of “immersive narratives”, in order to highlight continuities and discontinuities concerning a topic that is still marginally considered in contemporary critical debate.

This contribution will focus on some aspects of the roots of environmental art in Italy, with reference to works created between the 1950s and 1960s by Lucio Fontana, to environments designed by members of Gruppo T and other artists (Giulio Paolini, Luciano Fabro) in the 1960s, and through to reflections on the different uses of space that were defined with the exhibition Lo spazio dell’immagine held in Foligno in 1967. The approach is not, however, that of a historical review of well-known events, but of an investigation into the way to understand the relationship between outside and inside, the sense and value of the "passage", the conception of the modifying factors, starting with light, which have acted on the definition of space as an element to be traversed, rather than a place to be in, emphasising the dynamics that define a dialectical, if not antithetical, relationship with respect to architectural and design qualities in the proper sense, leading to reading the environmental art intervention as an invitation to follow a path.

Among the least critically and theoretically investigated practices, rock concerts reactivate and reconstitute ancient practices and postmodern artifices. They invoke the tradition of classical tragedy and, at the same time, take up the artifice of re-enactment. They are also part of the horizon of contemporary Dionysism. And, above all, they relaunch the Wagnerian utopia of Gesamtkunstwerk.

Concerts – from those of David Bowie to Pink Floyd to U2 – are not only popular moments of entertainment and relaxation, but authentic total works of art. Immersive installations that call to be lived and continued by the audience. Changing aggregates of artistic experiences in which the audience is a decisive part. Mediascapes in which communication technologies, theatrical performances, environmental contexts and artistic experimentation meet, interact and recombine, each relinquishing some of their own prerogatives. Acting, music and dance coexist. Music, architecture, cinema, video art, performance and happenings combine in an enveloping, synaesthetic dimension. This decrees the definitive demise of certain late-idealist positions. The traditional limits that separated avant-garde and consumer production are definitively challenged. It is pointless to re-propose dichotomies that are now obsolete. It is more opportune to abandon the fixed demarcations that separate one form from another, and to question ourselves on the opportunities offered by the interstitial spaces, where anything can happen. Only in this way will it be possible to meet an increasingly widespread demand for “art”. This is manifested first and foremost in events such as the great rock concerts (from Woodstock to Live 8), in which a sort of anti-metaphysical heterotopia triumphs. As Gianni Vattimo has pointed out, we can see 'the ornamental essence of mass society culture', the ephemeral quality of its products, 'the eclecticism that dominates it, the impossibility of recognising any essentiality in it'. These events fully correspond to the “Wesen of the aesthetic in late modernity”. The bewildering aspect prevails over the comforting aspect. In Heideggerian terms, the "earth" imposes itself on the "world".

The international conference hosts the section Dive In: Performance in immersive environments, curated by Roberto Paolo Malaspina and Sofia Pirandello. Forming an integral part of the conference as a whole, Dive In focuses on those artistic practices, such as performance art, which have best addressed and questioned the relationship between body and space, and which are thus found to be a privileged investigative tool in understanding the ways in which this relationship evolves and changes even in the most compelling contemporary context.

The broader context of performance art has, in fact, always investigated the complex connections existing between bodies, spaces, artists and the public, in order to generate forms of meaning which go beyond a specific material medium (consider the foundational practices of Marina Abramović, Joseph Beuys, Wolf Vostell, FLUXUS, Viennese Actionism or theatre groups such as Environmental Theatre and Richard Schechner's Performance Group). The experiences of twentieth-century avant-garde performance artists threw into confusion the notion, typically associated with artistic creation, of art as an artefact and opened the door to new forms of experience which resisted aesthetic interpretations founded on the traditional division between subject and object (Fischer-Lichte 2008). Recently invented media such as Virtual or Augmented Reality seem to resonate strongly with such characteristics: They function exclusively in relation to the user's body and its agentive space, conceal the objective nature of the medium itself, which becomes progressively more transparent, and generate images presenting themselves as immersive environments or parts of such (Pinotti 2017) These so-called new digital technologies have increasingly led to a performative dimension on the part of their users, who are constantly connected to their artefacts and their own context of action. They show a tendency towards miniaturisation, which, from portability to wearability, reaches the point of progressive disappearance as much in physical space, which becomes responsive and smart (Crescimanno 2015), as in the human body, which is increasingly referred to employing the term cyborg (Haraway 1985; Clark 2004; Braidotti 2019).

Dive In, therefore, asks how these most recent digital technologies enter into dialogue with performance art practices, causing transformative consequences on both sides. If, on the one hand, these technologies have inevitable consequences on artistic actions and practices, on the other, it is art itself that invests the means it employs with new meaning and with cultural and political awareness.
How has a new technological paradigm dictated a reconfiguration of the concepts of body and space, their interaction and the artistic disciplines that investigate this? How much and what kind of space is there for the human body in technological and immersive environments? Can we speak of an excessive delegation of the body to technology? Can the spread of immersive digital technologies be read in continuity with the perspectives which characterised performance in the 20th century or does it herald a new way to interact with and act on space? Is the performative dimension of the user more or less predominant than in the past?

Dive In consists of seven interventions at the conference and four written contributions, listed below.

“The image is kissing you. It licks you” intimates Laure Prouvost in the renowned film Swallow from 2013. A voice-over in the amateur video Into all that is there (2015) whispers to the viewer, “Just follow me. Closer. We need to go deeper”.

Laure Prouvost was born in Lille (France) in 1978, emigrated to Great Britain as a teenager and trained at Central Saint Martin in London. She worked as an assistant to conceptual artist John Latham, from whom she derives both the interest in the substance of the work of art, multi-material and not infrequently made with collage, together with the curiosity for its essentially performative aspect. Prouvost was only thirteen years old when Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web was made accessible, and like many artists of her generation she can be approached through the lenses of "post-internet" artistic experimentation. There is, however, also a very interesting dimension in the way the French artist seems to rethink the performance practice, mainly by employing two elements. On the one hand, in her work there is the centrality of the image, more precisely the plastic quality of moving images, determining the surrounding environmental installation. On the other hand, Prouvost questions the Leib as a place of knowledge, Baumgarten would say, perceivable and sensitive. A knowledge that in her production appears structurally implicated in the ability of a body — human, vegetable, zoomorphic or electronic — to experience pure sensations.

Given such a centrality of the bodily element, it is not surprising to find in Prouvost a significant interest in the artistic experiments and theories of the 1960s and 1970s. In the same years in which the publications on prehistory by Leroi-Gourhan and Laming-Emperaire were coming to light, in the seminal Expanded Cinema of 1970, Gene Youngblood discussed a “Paleocybernetic Age” that would dialogue with the “primitive potential associated with the Palaeolithic”. In an extensive reference to the primordial, the artist seems to participate in that form of “polymorphous eroticism”, subversive and alternative to the entertainment industry discussed by Youngblood. At the same time, Prouvost weaves a lively dialogue with the work of those female artists engaged since the second half of 1960s in the performative praxis and, more precisely, in the film restitution of the performance. It is a two-faced performative dimension, which relates as much to the acting body as to the agency of the technical medium arising from editing, sound and the manipulation of celluloid.

From a historiographical perspective, this contribution shows how Prouvost’s video works intersect a plexus of perceptual strategies investigated in the 1990s, but dating back to the early 20th century, if not to prehistory. These include Ellen Dissanayake’s “Hands-on” competence, Gallese and Rizzolatti’s “embodied simulation”, Giuliana Bruno’s “site-seeing”, Laura U. Marks’ “haptic visuality” or kinaesthetic haptic perception discussed by Annette Michelson. Exploring in a sensual, ironic and highly interspecific manner the participatory experience that the viewer has of a body — or rather, of a variegated plexus of entangled bodies — acting on the screen, Prouvost creates a disorienting and layered proto- and post-cinematic narrative that, in dialogue with the present time, deeply questions its paradigms.

This paper sets out to analyse Laure Prouvost’s practice as an example of a creative approach based on the spectator’s immersion in intermedial settings composed of objects drawn from of different spatial-temporal sources. Ever since the beginning of the 2000s, the French artist’s installations have been presented as mise-en-scène with an avowedly naïve aesthetic which, combining video, painting, drawing, sculpture and performance, can be analysed as compositions of materials and references taken from the most disparate contexts - pop music, mass culture, the web and family albums. As if they were unstable visual entities, these portions of the work come together in different configurations, creating surreal atmospheres in which any hierarchical order between the observer and the observed object is suspended. The viewer is sent off to move through space, becoming an object among objects; he is forced to reconstruct the narrative in which he is inserted by means of clues and instructions; he is constantly tested by effects of splitting, repetition, manipulation and aggregation that encompass the sense and form of the composition.

Finding valuable philosophical support in Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), this paper focuses in particular on the analysis of two projects presented by Laure Prouvost in recent years. The first, Dit Learn (2017), is a video which chooses objects and words as the protagonists of a wide-ranging reflection on language and which, engaging the viewer in learning new forms of communication, occupies a central position both in an extended installation at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (They Are Waiting for You, 2017) and in a play at the Kaai Theatre in Brussels (2019). The second, Deep See Blue Surrounding You (2019), is the exhibition project organised by the artist on the occasion of her participation in the 58th International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. Here, once again starting from a video - They Parlaient Idéale (2019) - the artist creates an installation made of objects which affords the viewer the possibility of total immersion in a fathomless world.
After structurally and critically describing the two works, this contribution analyses their role as hyper-enactments (a term introduced by the author in the context of doctoral research): mise-en-scène in which the certainty of any perceptive orientation is lost, and which, precisely because of the random aggregation of spatio-temporally different materials, are to be considered milieus of images in which a narrative and aesthetic linearity is suspended.

Over the past few years, I developed my artistic research on the social impact of web interfaces and the subversion of centralised social media platforms, by focusing on ways to avoid the culture of Interveillance, a participatory surveillance enabled by social media’s power structures, that leverages on the human need to auto-determine themselves.

Often unaware, users become an active part of these hidden power dynamics that are no longer based on control and repression of bodies, but on prevention through the promotion of beliefs and habits that leverage on processes of identification, and that manifest themselves in the form of viral trends.

Within my artistic practice I have outlined two possible methods that can be used as ways to subvert centralised social media platform dynamics. The first is what I call Data overload: an appropriation and manipulation of users personal content to make data unreadable (analyzed through my projects I Stalk Myself More Than I Should and Welcome to my Channel). The second is the creation of online fictional narratives and transmedia storytelling that I developed with the works Forehead Vulva Channelling Research and Die Verwandlung.

These projects have proven that the disruption of the user experience within social media platforms has the potential to engage with users and bring awareness with a non-manipulative approach.

The present contribution wants to investigate how the use of technology is redefining the performative role of visitor bodies within museum environments. It will address the topic of the physical body of museum goers as an experiential tool and discuss to what extent its active, at times performative, use across museum settings has been and is considered as an important element of the cultural experience. This research offers a storeographical account which begins from visitor engagement in the early 17th to 19th century museums, where visitors were entitled and encouraged to establish active experiential relationships with both museum spaces and cultural artifacts, establishing the body, and its senses, as a decisive epistemic device. At this stage the physical engagement was not to be considered performative in itself, yet it preserved a spontaneous quality which anticipated the sense of freedom and timeliness later captured by performance art. After assessing the role of the body in the early museum experience, an account of the ‘disappearance’ of the visitor body in modern museums will be provided. In this stage the active effort to negate the relevance of a physical interaction with artworks will be called upon, through a discussion on the theoretical framework which legitimized the substantially intellectual-visual grounds for the aesthetic experience. Interestingly, this perspective has come to influence museum spaces and visitor experiences for more than two centuries, dictating a very aseptic and referential logic and dynamic of experience. This trend is just now starting to be countered through the revival of a more systemic and bodily understanding of these spaces, with technologies playing a very important role in incentivizing and characterizing this shift. The case for the positive interplay between museums and technological artistic experience towards a performative engagement of the visitor’s physical presence will be made through the case study of the Nxt Museum, in Amsterdam. This institution, which has only been open for a few years, has made it its mission to create “large scale, multi-sensory exhibitions which challenge assumptions and open minds”, working through media art. The specific project that will be here analyzed is the Shifting Proximities exhibition, which through immersive installations by eight different artists explores human experience and interaction in the face of social and technological change. Among the different artworks two will be taken into account – Zoom Pavillion by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Connected by Roelof Knol – thanks to the engagement that each of them allows with the visitor’s body. Through this last institutional account the research will complete its itinerary through performative action across museum experiences in time and space, arguing for the relevance that technological media can play in transforming visitors’ relationship with art through their bodies.

In the field of screen studies and in the different ways artists used it, the screen has been theoretically and technically considered a threshold, an obstacle, something to confront with or even to transgress. This first definition of the screen, however, remains very frontal and static. It no longer stands if we confront it to the concept of immersion, which advocates a real habitability of the screen. Building a “screenology” and a history of the notion of immersion makes it possible to extend the understanding of the screen beyond the various existing contemporary technological devices. The concept of immersion, in its most literal, etymological sense, means to immerse all or part of one's body in a liquid, most of the time aqueous, and to remain there to experience new sensations. This primordial experience of immersion seems decisive to understand how immersion is now conceptualized and implemented not only in contemporary works, but also in older devices. Water, shown on the surface or in depth, is a recurring motif in cinema whether fictional or experimental. It is this recurrence of the aquatic motif, considering the great symbolic importance it bears within film, that leads to questioning these different uses, especially the subaquatic ones. Addressing the question of the submarine enables going beyond the simple motif of water as a surface or as a real metaphor of the matter of the image, and thus to move towards a real “environmentalization” of this element. There is a historical continuity between immersive experiments in virtual reality and the earliest desires to immerse the spectator under water. A study of the first underwater cinematographic experiments and of the design of the first large aquariums built for the universal exhibitions of the late 19th century is very useful to the identification of this continuity. Departing from the different issues raised by these experiments, we will see that virtual reality also recurrently resorts to water as a pretext to immerse the user in the work of art. The most exemplary work on this subject will be the virtual installation set up by Char Davies, Osmose (1995) which offers a literaldive into a virtual universe that operates according to the laws of the submarine.

The purpose of such research is to demonstrate how the aquatic element and the submarine especially, are both very useful pretexts for the effective immersion of a spectator into an artwork. It also aims to demonstrate how water and immersion therein are central to the current definition of the concept of immersion.

It is 1926. Antonin Artaud is writing the preface-manifesto for the first season of Alfred Jarry Theatre. Theatrical conventions had come to a standstill. The dramatist finds himself and his audience bored and nauseated; the only way out of the impasse is to invoke a new theatre where the performance is always unique and unforeseen. In search of a complete show, Artaud continues by providing us with a real-life example – an urban performance. What choreography belongs to places we inhabit? By comparing the police raid to a ballet, the author manages to reinterpret under a theatrical structure an event that belongs to the social dynamics of the city. What is staged in theatres has always been nothing other than the exemplification of events in daily life; and now, what happens in the city is nothing less than “a complete spectacle”–going so far as to deny completely the need for a deliberate place for it. Starting from Artaud’s admonition, the intervention aims to explore the possibility of analysing the urban settlements according to a plot that takes shape from the observer’s eye; from the gaze of those who attempt to navigate the city through flânerie to discover neglected theatrical events. The next step: reordering city’s spaces for our entertainment, drafting a new map where morphology does not follow any more conventional urban-planning guidelines. As architects, how can we modify the existing city plan to frame our performances within it? The rules through which we read the city, have changed. We can design world’s metropolis led by what we recognize as episodes, forgetting patterns that occur with urban design – circulation, functionality, infrastructure. We will understand how, when we get the chance of “draw[ing] a map to get lost” (Yoko Ono, Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings by Yoko Ono, 1964), the urban space becomes scenography, the city’s noise soundtrack, the pedestrians our characters. When following random routes or moving according to someone else's itinerary, other people’s footsteps become means of transport, distance between A-B is no longer measured by miles. The city, the way we negotiate with its complexity and its cluttered plan, switch substructure. The city becomes a theatre.

Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are a set of hybrid ludic practices utilizing cross-media narration that emerged with the rise of the Internet, and which fall under the type of performance where the spectators are the main performers (Garcia & Niemeyer 2017). They are constructed as real-life treasure hunts, where the participants are guided by a puppet master in public spaces, through “rabbit holes”, i.e. hints distributed on social networks and/or websites. Similar to the artist who lays down the rules of the performance between themselves and the audience, the puppet master gives the players general instructions towards completing the game. However, whereas performance art is still closely dependent on the subjectivity of the artist, the puppet master’s (more subdued) role is solely to accompany the players in their experience.

ARGs have contributed to a less vertical relationship between work and spectator, as well as to bring performance outside of art institutions. Moreover, with the growth of social platforms online and especially YouTube, the term “ARG” has been used more broadly to refer to new dispositifs, which we call Alternate Virtuality Games (AVGs), such as This House Has People In It (Resnick 2016) or Ben Drowned (Jadusable 2010). They too are a kind of treasure hunts with well-hidden hints, but they are unique in that they are digital-native: they are strictly performed online and do not ask the players to go outside. The rabbit holes of AVGs are merged with the dispositif itself and are given as fictional devices. There is no apparent puppet master, nor apparent goal or treasure, other than finding new leads and new connections between elements of the “game”. The player/performer can thus view every aspect of their experience as part of said game. As such, AVGs are more akin to video games, as they tend to dissolve the object/subject dichotomy (Bekirov & Vaillancourt 2017).

Therefore, the persona of the artist is no more presented as a demiurge welcoming the profane audience to their performance. To access and participate in the AVG, the spectator needs not go to a specific place where their experience is being validated: the work takes place through the digital interface. In the case of AVGs, there is no clear delimitation between the space allotted to the performance and the one allotted to “real life”. The theoretical background behind this concrete blurring of subject and object can be found in Simondon, Bataille or Winnicott (Bekirov & Vaillancourt 2017). The immersiveness of AVGs is unbound by the space and time of a specific happening, and is rather experienced by a multitude of agents at different times and places. This characteristic of being an extra-individual experience as well as being independent from institutions also places AVGs within liminal experiences such as studied by Turner (Bekirov & Vaillancourt 2021). These performing agents dive into a state that mirrors our relationship to digital devices in a society of information – and control.

Recent developments in technology and the digital have changed our relationship with our bodies and the external world. Reflections around post-humanism are inevitably intertwined with these transformations, as are questions about how our relationship with ourselves, the environment and the non-human may evolve in the near future.

In anti-speciesist thinking, the digital introduces new elements of measurement and awareness, and is capable of changing the terms of the confrontation that inevitably starts from an anthropocentric assumption. How does this shift change the anthropocentric perspective? 3D technology and Augmented Reality are two examples of how the mutation of a perceptual language into something more – e.g. into a language that from perceptual becomes performative – can provide enriching ground on which to build a new sensibility.

My theoretical and curatorial research addresses the capacities of these technologies to modify the profound relationship we have with the animal universe, starting from the artistic field. Digital technologies extend the horizons of interaction and operability of art in two directions: immersive technology as reenactement; immersive technology as reversal and embodiment. The former allows us to understand, like cinema, documentary, and other expressive media, what man is and has been from a perspective both contemporary and historical. A parallel can be made, 50 years later, with the experimental cinema of Yervant Gianikian and Cristina Ricci Lucchi. If the artists took the found footage of a pro-fascist documentary filmmaker like Luca Comerio to emphasize the gaze of the white hunter (see Dal Polo All’Equatore) through slowing down and physically editing the film, the immersive reenactement of a hunting event allows the hunter’s gaze (whether on man or animal) to be experienced firsthand, through a live-action experience. At the end of June 2023, I am promoting a project created with artist Giovanna Repetto in the FAI gardens of Palazzo Moroni (BG), around a roccolo. The roccolo is a hunting post – now banned – that allowed a large number of birds to be captured with a trap call. The artist will reenact the presence of migratory birds with the use of holograms and, through the use of an app, the presence of hunters with Augmented Reality.

Immersive technology as a reversal and embodiment, differently, stimulates and in a sense forces the viewer to adopt non-human perspectives in an attempt to understand something other than ourselves through senses and psychomotor involvement. In 2021 I created a project in collaboration with the Mattatoio in Rome, presented in Verona with Spazio Volta, that re-imagines the context of a 2019 experiment that took place in Russia, where cattle were raised in virtual reality. Users could watch through 3D visors what they imagined a bovine might see in an artificially controlled environment, adopting an animal’s point of view. Digital technologies offer not only new capabilities for investigating the real, but a changed relationship between the body and the environment, the body and the archive, the body and the Other, such as the animal. The shift of the speculative narrative from a subject-object perspective to a 360-degree environment reconfigures the role of the viewer, and it is this performativity that allows for the stimulation of a new form of awareness, which goes hand in hand with the physicality of the virtual to overcome the physical limits of the human body as a sensory prosthesis.

“Falling” is a dream sequence of me physically falling endlessly. One dream that resonates with me takes place on a train, elevated on a bridge, and a sudden gravitational force pulls me down. The train begins to trail off the tracks and eventually falls off a bridge.

In parallel, I was interested in connecting this feeling of falling with the notion of falling asleep. In my experience with insomnia, I recall counting every stipple in my popcorn ceiling to convince myself to fall asleep. The painful and dreadful wanting to be asleep was another experience I aimed to include, oscillating between the dream and reality. I relied on point clouds to paint this elusive nature of dreams while depicting the scene in virtual reality. I brought the user visually from the front, bottom, and top of my bedroom, fixed on my bed, locking the perspective to the movement of the VR headset. I did not give any agency to the user to look around the room, and the only perspective one had was in the direction of the camera. This view gave me a feeling of being out of place to add another depth to the forced immersion I aimed to convey.

I began to explore how to convey this feeling of anxious, oppressive, and even passive state through sounds. First, there were the sounds of outer space, such as the sound of Saturn, to the score music by Hans Zimmer for films such as Interstellar and Dune, which was effective in conveying fright, uneasiness, and confusion. Next, the examples led me to the sounds of Shepard Tone, which filmmakers often used during scenes of violence or intensity to make one more frightened. As the project dealt with many physical movements and confusion in experiencing the film, I realized the piece could cause nausea or motion sickness during the gameplay. Therefore, I added a warning at the beginning to make sure the user is aware before starting the experience. In addition, this project should be experienced sitting, ensuring safety if the participant feels unsafe or uneasy.

Many moments in dreams can feel insignificant; however, dreams are a set of structured narratives depicting one’s current state of emotions. The repeating dreams of falling become almost like a déjà vu, and there is no specific control over what to dream, let alone how to react in a dream.

Instead, dreams are the ultimate immersive experience, and this piece aims to recreate a part of that immersion. The only action we are allowed is to comprehend what we see and think. I sought to stay true to this experience by removing any hand interaction, only allowing the eyes and the movement of my head to interact in the virtual reality. Ultimately, the subtraction in the experience added a layer of confusion to provoke a sense of no control and helplessness. And this inability to fight gravity or lethargy is what I can convey through the use of virtual reality, a medium that fights to be progressively more transparent and blurs what actual and virtual reality is.

Project Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UAruu2V4_Q