Chapter 2 - Understanding Digital Immersive Art

Summary

In its most baseline understanding, digital immersive art is artistic work mediated by digital technology. Digital immersive art plays a role in disseminating cultural value. Digitisation facilitates the consumption of art products, often in new ways. In other words, art plus (digital) technology provides novel experiences and new ways of imagining the world. China now wants to ‘tell its stories well’. The interface of culture and technology has changed the production, consumption and speed of distribution of Chinese culture. If Chinese art is mediated successfully, this may potentially change the image of China globally. Digital immersive art thus provides an exemplary example. In this chapter, I offer an interdisciplinary approach to critique the intersection of digital technology and art.

In the first three sections, I focus on definitions of digital immersive art and how digital technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) enhance digital art. Following this, I consider the concept of ‘cultural presence’. I provide two ways of understanding cultural presence. The first refers to how technology can help create the impression that the viewer is immersed in the artwork, in this way allowing the user a unique virtual experience of culture. The second, which I will introduce in this chapter and further discuss in the following chapter is from the viewpoint of the nation and references China's cultural influence outside the People's Republic of China (PRC). I will show how these two kinds of cultural presence are interconnected.

In a philosophical sense, the term ‘presence’ originates from the German philosopher Martin Heidegger's (1962) ontology of ‘being’. Cultural presence, thus, reflects the ontology of culture: an individual ‘being’ in a cultural environment. This study argues that VR and AR have the potential to generate a cultural presence in digital immersive art. The use of digital technology, especially VR, can accelerate how artworks connect with the public, and vice versa. Art is a statement in public space. In the present day, the intervention of immersive technology, the internet and art museums are changing the conventional definition of public space for art viewers. On the other hand, VR has helped museums make culture accessible to a mass audience by extending the museum's boundaries to the modern entertainment industry (Carrozzino & Bergamasco, 2010).