ARTH 642 Media and New Media: Immersion

• Instructor: Dr. May Chew

Immersion is a ubiquitous element of contemporary art practice and audience engagement. We might even argue that it increasingly structures the ways in which we navigate our material and virtual worlds. While acknowledging its more recent manifestations, this course also aims to historicize immersion in art and media. We will examine how technologies touted as “new” can be traced to aspects of 18th century panoramas, early museum dioramas, 1960s experiments in expanded media, and more. At the same time, we will explore how immersion can and has been simultaneously reconceptualized through anticolonial epistemologies and practice that upend colonial understandings of the relationship between body, technology, and the occupation of land/space. Conceptually, we will employ immersion—particularly its premise of the work of art/text as seamless or “total”—as a means to explore affect, atmosphere, labour, absorption, and control. This in turn will illuminate the ways that immersion can be investigated as a broader social and political figure, especially with regard to surveillance capitalism and attention economies.