I presented this talk at the Nownet Arts Conference, November 2023: “Immersion in the Network Arts,” and my goal was to bring a historical perspective to a seemingly modern topic: the immersive experience.

Abstract: Imagine you’re laying in a sensory deprivation chamber. The sights and sounds of the outside world have been replaced by an uneasy void… you float, without access even to your own weight, and almost paradoxically another world begins to open in front of your eyes. There are many facets to immersion and many forms it can take. Popular imaginings include things like VR goggles, IMAX cinema, a rock concert, multimedia performance art etc… but clearly there’s more to immersion than simply adding bells and whistles.  In this presentation we attempt to probe at the fundamental aspects of immersion, by looking backwards in time. European liturgical music in the 16th century was a sophisticated art form, itself drawing on a certain astronomical, mathematical, magical and philosophical paradigm, and on a legacy stretching back (at least in narrative) to the ancient Greeks. Progress, technology and innovation meant something other than they do today. Though many aspects of this culture don’t map well onto our current situation, there were still tools and there were goals, and of course there was the human mind, navigating external and internal realities. Reaching across disciplines we (immersion-oriented forensic detectives) attempt to paint a more experiential picture of the 16th century liturgical soundscape: what kinds of methods were used, what kinds of priorities shaped the encounter and what were the expectations or larger goals? We attempt to give the compositional techniques of imitation, canon and ornamentation a cognitive, philosophical and phenomenological grounding, and to embed them within larger structures of immersion, in the ritual celebration of the mass and its transformational agenda, and speculate about how those structures tap into more fundamental, extra-cultural ideas. Though it can take many forms, we start with the immersive potential of XYZ space itself – the suggestion of dimensionality, the extrapolation of additional planes and the population and saturation of those planes with material. We draw some speculative connections with inbuilt cognitive mechanisms, metaphysical philosophy, psychedelic geometry, compositional-liturgical techniques and with trans-humanist discourse. We also touch on the idea of ritualised immersion and how it relates to our assumptions about engagement and participation. We propose that both fields (historically-informed performance practice and immersive network arts) navigate a similar terrain, striking a careful balance between craft, art, research, technology, escapism, fantasy, connection and non-belonging, and we address the potential overlap between experience-commodification and early-music revivalism. In case it needs saying, we look to old forms of immersion not to dismiss electronically-based forms, but to probe into every facet of the matter, to help us interact with histories of immersion in a more complete and effective way, and by reflecting inform ourselves about future possibilities.