Eyes Wide Shut, Senses Wide Open… Immersion Beyond Screens

Beyond screens and showy or spectacular audiovisual staging, immersion can also be experienced in a more subtle and sensory way—one in which sound, light, and tactile elements address the body and the psyche directly. This approach is guided less by technological escalation than by perceptual experience, leaving more room for emotion than for technical bravado. A closer look at these alternative artists.

Immersion is clearly having a moment. It has captured the attention of economic and political decision-makers alike, as it now sits at the heart of the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI). The recent Immersive Culture and Metaverse call for projects launched under the France 2030 plan is a telling example. Major cultural venues have also embraced immersion, promoting ultra-visual, 360-degree audiovisual experiences designed, as they claim, “to make art more attractive or to enhance the audience’s experience” (L’Atelier des Lumières). But one may wonder whether this proliferation of technological effects—largely based on screens or multi-screen setups—doesn’t ultimately become intrusive, even overwhelming. By focusing on spectacle, do such approaches risk reducing immersion to a purely visual overload? Doesn’t this flood of images and information end up undermining what lies at the heart of an immersive experience: the subtlety of perception and the intimacy of emotion?

Immersion Through Sound, Light, and Architecture

Historically, the principles of immersion are deeply rooted in the articulation of sound, light, and architecture. This is what researcher Éric Monin, a specialist in lighting and sound design in historical heritage contexts, describes as “spatial experience.” Unsurprisingly, twentieth-century artists who explored early immersive audiovisual devices worked with these very elements. Composers such as La Monte Young, with Dream House—conceived as an audio-light environment for the audience—or Iannis Xenakis, with Polytope de Cluny, a live electroacoustic work combining soundtracks and flashes of light, laid the groundwork. These approaches, blending intensity and softness, timelessness and physical disorientation, continued through the chromatic experiments of American artist James Turrell. His recent exhibition at the At One Gagosian gallery in Le Bourget offered a striking demonstration of the immersive power of his work.

While shifts—particularly in color—are often subtle, the intrusion of flickers and psycho-optical effects inherited from the hypnotic principles of Brion Gysin’s Dream Machine (developed in the late 1950s and originally experienced with eyes closed) introduce physical destabilization. This is where a more radical generation of artists, influenced by the subversive electronic and industrial music cultures of the 1980s and 1990s, takes hold. The work of Austrian artist Kurt Hentschläger is emblematic in this regard. From Feed, Zee, and Karma to the more recent Sub—presented just a year ago at the KIKK Festival in Namur—the former member of Granular Synthesis creates immersive environments based on retinal persistence. These intense experiences, driven by stroboscopic light flooding the space, require audiences to adapt physically. Screens are used as sources of emission, but the sheer intensity causes their material presence to dissolve, giving way to a form of total mental immersion that often leads viewers to close their eyes.

Among the following generation, French artist Guillaume Marmin also explores powerful sensory experiences through what he calls “moving environments,” rooted in a childhood fantasy of “being able to step inside the films I loved.” His work Unseen, presented at the latest Némo Biennial, explores hallucinatory mechanisms with a strong sense of poetic vibration. Sitting somewhere between Turrell’s chromatic aesthetics and Hentschläger’s physical intensity, the piece is based on phosphene phenomena—colored forms perceived with closed eyes when exposed to light. Guillaume Marmin, however, claims a closer lineage to Gysin’s Dream Machine—this time experienced with eyes open. “Unseen is designed to trigger hallucinatory visions through flickering light sources,” he explains, “creating and transforming mental images that have no physical support, strictly speaking.” Drawing on neuroscience research—such as the work of Michael Rule—he notes that controlling flicker frequencies makes it possible to influence the shape and color of perceived visions. “The audience becomes both the medium and the observer of a work that exists at the boundary between the real and the virtual.”

Immersion Through the Body

Visual immersion is far from the only sensory gateway explored by artists. Immersion can also be bodily—often allowing spectators to rest their eyes while surrendering to tactile, almost massage-like experiences. French artist Julien Clauss has developed several works in which listening occurs directly through the body and vibration. In Isotropie de l’Ellipse Tore, participants press themselves against a hemispherical wooden structure to feel sound traveling from ceiling to floor, emitted by a suspended loudspeaker and set into centrifugal motion along the sculpture’s surface. In Pause, created with Lynn Pook, audiences lie in one of five hammocks, experiencing the oscillations of an autonomous audio-tactile machine powered by fourteen speakers transmitting vibrations through pulleys, arches, and springs.

A similar approach appears in Transvision, by Marseille-based artist Gaëtan Parseihian, a member of the deletere laboratories. Here, the tactile structure is collective: a suspended fabric in the center of the space on which the audience lies, guided by vibrations, frequencies, minimal light—and the absence of images. Music becomes central in what the artist calls a “meta-vehicle.” “Music opens up mental worlds to explore,” Gaëtan Parseihian explains, “but as soon as vision enters this kind of experience, it restricts the imagination.” Hence the name Transvision: “We’re trying to move beyond the limits of sight.” This journey, at times resembling altered states of consciousness, proposes a stripped-down, minimalist approach to immersion—“a counterpoint to today’s cult of performance,” as Gaëtan Parseihian puts it, and “a synesthetic experience of slowness down to its molecular level.” The project may even extend beyond the artistic field, with a forthcoming research residency exploring therapeutic applications within France’s Culture and Health program (Solaris de l’AP-HM).

This organic, almost vital dimension is also present in Éric Arnal-Burtschy’s recent work Je suis une Montagne. Drawing on choreographic inspirations, the piece treats the body itself as the site of immersion. Spectators, seated in deck chairs suspended above the stage, are invited to keep their eyes closed while experiencing rain, wind, heat, scents, and intense halos of light. Like an ancient mountain shaped by time and seasons, they are invited “to feel that we are part of something much larger than ourselves—energy flows that make up our universe, our planet, and ourselves.” Sound once again plays a central role, accompanied by disorienting sensations of movement. “The sound is deliberately spatialized around the audience, treated almost like a body moving around them,” Arnal-Burtschy notes. Many spectators report the sensation of rotating, moving forward, or traveling. Time itself becomes elastic: “The piece lasts an hour, but most people think it’s only twenty or thirty minutes,” he observes. “It’s as if the body recalibrates the perception of time during this cosmic immersion.”

Researching Sensory Immersion: The Case of PRISM

To create Je suis une Montagne, Arnal-Burtschy collaborated scientifically with a laboratory specializing in organic and molecular chemistry to design the work’s scents. This research-driven approach highlights how immersive sensory practices open pathways well beyond the art world. This is precisely the focus of PRISM, an interdisciplinary laboratory under the supervision of the CNRS, Aix-Marseille University, and the Ministry of Culture, bringing together researchers and artist-researchers specializing in image, sound, and music. “We’re interested in immersion for several reasons,” explains Sølvi Ystad, PRISM’s director and a PhD in acoustics. “Until now, we’ve focused on sound immersion, but with the multisensory immersion platform we’re developing, we want to study how humans perceive their natural environment.” One of PRISM’s goals is to better understand how environments influence behavior and perception—avoiding the sensory overload often experienced in overly spectacular immersive spaces. Short sounds, Ystad notes, can have powerful effects: “A sound shorter than 200 milliseconds—like a car door closing—can convey a whole narrative and influence perceptions of quality and safety.” As immersive and VR technologies proliferate, she warns, poorly designed experiences can have negative impacts. “It’s essential to adapt these systems to human sensory capacities.”

“Some studies show, for example, that an ultra-brief sound lasting less than 200 milliseconds can tell an entire story—such as the sound of a car door closing, which shapes perceptions of a vehicle’s quality and solidity and, as a result, can influence car sales,” explains Sølvi Ystad. “With the rise of new immersive technologies and virtual reality, we will be increasingly exposed to these virtual environments. And without careful attention to how we perceive them, such experiences can have negative effects on us. It is therefore essential to design these systems around humans and our sensory capacities, and to remain vigilant about how they are introduced into society.” Another key research focus of the lab is understanding how to reproduce the acoustics of a space as faithfully as possible, in order to identify which acoustic parameters are perceptually essential.

PRISM also studies how to accurately reproduce the acoustics of real-world spaces—from sites documented through the ANR Sésames project to the Abbey of Le Thoronet, renowned for its exceptional acoustics. These reconstructions make it possible to interact with the recreated environments in real time and to observe behavior—for instance, by studying how 3D sound environments influence the performance of cellists. As Gaëtan Parseihian suggests, sensory immersion also holds strong potential in healthcare. PRISM has notably collaborated on the creation of immersive sound rooms in psychiatric hospitals, where early findings indicate a calming effect on patients, including those on the autism spectrum.

A Participatory Field of Research

To explore all of these potential areas of application, PRISM relies primarily on psychophysical approaches in its research. “That means we present participants with perfectly calibrated simulations and ask them to evaluate them. This allows us to establish links between acoustic parameters and the perceptions they generate,” summarizes Sølvi Ystad. “In the context of auditory immersion, we generally assess sensations such as envelopment, the perceived proximity of sound sources, timbre, and so on. The near field is also a key area of research at the lab. Our perception is altered within the peripersonal space, and we are particularly interested in understanding how perception changes depending on the distance from a sound source.”

Sensory immersion is therefore not an issue confined to the world of technological or digital art, as creators such as Julien Poidevin, Soundwalk Collective when designing their ambulatory listening devices, or the duo Félicie d’Estienne d’Orves and Julie Rousse when composing the sound scores for the geospatial readings of stars in their laser-based installation EXO, might still frame it. Sensory immersion is, more broadly, one way among others of better understanding and representing the life and environments that surround us—so that they can be placed more thoughtfully at the service of the humans who inhabit them.

Laurent Catala