«Holistic Expeditions. Immersion and Eclipse»
By Thomas Oberender
Like the Covid virus, a solar eclipse also presses the pause button – for a few minutes God takes away the world’s colours and the birds fall silent. In that moment, there are no atheists. The Covid-19 pandemic became an experience of how our planet is connected – both the good and the bad were shared by people on all continents. The pandemic pressed the pause button on the engine driving the world economy.
Silent skies. For almost eight weeks my window ledges were free from soot. No kerosene was being dumped from the fuel tanks of planes when a favourable tailwind had left them too full to land. In Venice, people began to see fish in the water again and birds walked down the streets of New York. Satellite images showed the industrial regions of China and Northern Italy no longer covered in smog. All this will do something to us. This experience was planet-wide, it will shape an entire generation and work like a bath of developer in analogue photography: it has accentuated social division, the processes of dismantling democracy and awareness of how urgent it is to change course politically and mentally.
The virus was a crash course in understanding how connected our planet is but also how connected we are with the planet. What a metaphor that we were infected by »cross-species transmission” – the virus jumping from the body of one species to another. The disappearance of a boundary between ecological spheres and species could hardly be illustrated more graphically: there are no »higher” and »lower” animals, as Lynn Margulis says, just an omnipresent life, that is fragile, that nourishes us and provides us with obligations.
All the dualisms that underlay my thinking in seminars and institutions, between impure nature on one hand and enlightened culture on the other, subject and object, savagery and civilisation, have been torn away by Covid-19. The virus and climate change are gripping us by the throat. It is not as if we would stop to think of our own free will. And not just because the state has imposed bans. It’s death. It takes death to stop the laughter and fill us humans with life’s concern for itself. It takes a deadly pandemic to plant the question of what a »good life” should look like in a sustainable sense. And how we can turn off and repurpose the engine that is destroying the world, as Arundhati Roy calls our earth-consuming behaviour.
Our age is erecting new physical barriers – between nations and continents, rich and poor – and at the same time it is marked by the experience of widespread loosening of boundaries that is linked to an experience of nature that threatens our species, but also with a loosening of the boundaries of knowledge, which is now retreating into the twilight, of data that is fluid, of genders, species, faiths. Vast industries are working on an entirely new culture of embeddedness, of cyber-networking and the cultivation of gigantic data farms that feed on our signs of life and use censors and trackers to harvest our thoughts, words, images and actions. This is how a giant school is being created in which artificial intelligence will get cleverer and cleverer until the mind migrates into a technological body.
In media theory this vanishing of boundaries is called »immersion”. Nowadays we can observe it mainly on two levels: as an aesthetic phenomenon it occurs whenever I am affected by an artwork to such an extent that I forget its medium. In a more complex sense, however, the term immersion also describes an artistic genre, distinguished by the fact that the aesthetic event loses its frame – for example, a theatre without a proscenium, with a stage that surrounds me and on which I find myself standing. The LARP projects by the Omsk Social Club are one of these forms. Like computer games in the digital space, they are real-time works that are based on complex world building that goes far beyond conventional scenography. Immersive art always creates space and allows me to see myself within that setting, something that is not possible in any other genre.
For me, immersive artworks in this genre-based sense are testing stations for understanding the world differently and behaving differently. They are holistic expeditions, exploring abundance. In common with other forms of immersion that can be induced organoleptically, emotionally, technically, spatially or cognitively, they bring about an experience of connection. Our ancient fear, particularly in Germany, is that intuition makes us stupider. Because distance alone allows us to be objective. But what if this ancient gesture of separation that shaped our Western society has led to the destruction of a culture of participation that now survives in a few indigenous cultures? If creating the idea and the status of the object, of the thing that can be used that is not us, has led to a rampant plundering of the earth? To what extent do the institutions of the art world reproduce this pattern in their own practice while attacking it on an intellectual level?
Artistic (and ritual) practices of immersion activate our awareness of being connected. Immersion creates this kind of »cross-species transmission”: a miroloi from the Mani peninsula is immersion. Love is total immersion: two individuals amalgamating into something that can be felt in someone else. Horror is total immersion. Meditation is immersion. VR, caves and planetariums can be immersive – these are always spaces, environments that can become our bodies. In the arts we have been asking ourselves for years whether classical institutions have not represented the toxic distinction between nature »outside” and culture »inside” as far too self-evident for far too long and have become part of a Western pathology, its gesture of separation, of detachment, its notion of reality as a dead object that, like the earth, is only allowed into a museum once it has been sterilised for three days.
Immersive artworks invite us to participate in a system of constant transformation and responsiveness and within our institutions we can include such new systems as counter systems to the gardens of data belonging to monopolists keeping a close eye on us. They generate hybrid ecologies that combine architecture, technology, narratives and bodies and embed us, the people experiencing them, inside them. Alertness to these boundary-breaking gestures and responsive, embedded structures frees us a little from the old system of classification, rehabilitates marginalised knowledge and we are never so active in the process of this transformation of consciousness as we are in the moment of a solar eclipse.
Thomas Oberender is Director of the Berliner Festspiele / Gropius Bau and Artistic Director of the ‘Immersion’ programme series. Its current project is ‘Down To Earth. Climate, Art, Discourse Unplugged’, which includes the Avtonomi Akadimia from Athens, among others.
Original Text written for Athens Biennale in 2019, Translated from the German by David Tushingham
AB7: Eclipse