«WORLDS WITHOUT EXTERIORS»
IMMERSION in the fields of the arts, technology, ecology and society 2016-2021
Thomas Oberender in Conversation with Nancy Pettinicchio
Nancy Pettinicchio: I wonder if you could describe the space you’re currently sitting in.
Thomas Oberender: At the moment I’m working from home, in an untidy workroom that you can’t see because of my virtual background. What you can see is some wallpaper that was designed by David Bowie.
NP: Do you usually work from home now?
TO: For the last year and a half, yes. But we’ve also put on exhibitions since the regulations were relaxed a little.
NP: The situation is the same in Canada. Most people have the opportunity to return to work in a hybrid form but the majority is still done from home. I’d like to ask a question about your own background. Your principal media were originally performance and theatre. Maybe we can talk about the strengths of performance and theatre, their connection with the audience and the way they encourage them to think.
TO: When we talk about the theatre, we’re talking about quite specific forms of Western theatre. There are certain rituals and conventions linked to this, the fourth wall for example, the expecta- tion that theatre will have something to do with texts, constructing repeatable events, actors presenting characters and so on. This kind of theatre normally takes place in a confined space, an artificial cave: it is a »theatre of the night” where vampires live, creatures that require the blood of the living and never see daylight. But this kind of theatre can also be organised very differently. For example, there is a type of theatre without people. By this I don’t mean robot theatre or object theatre, but a kind of theatre in which the space itself becomes a character and tells a story. We have produced plays where the audience does not sit facing the scenery but enters it and walks through it. Like a detective looking for clues. In this world, every detail is a staged sign and this is what generates a »narrative space”.
The life that these plays tell of lies entirely within those things — it speaks to us through these structures and the situational arrangement of all the tiny details that surround us. In these narrative spaces we flick through diaries, examine desks, listen to answerphone messages and come across medicines or food that say a lot about the people who live in these places. We produced a narrative space with Mona el Gammal that was spread over several storeys of a former telephone exchange. The work was called RHIZOMAT and it told the dystopian story of an underground movement that had just left its offices because the uprising against their Big Brother-style regime had begun. The coffee cups on the tables were still warm. With the Norwegian artist duo Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller, we spent six months building a complete theatre in a former munitions factory on the outskirts of the city,a giant installation with several stages and a large auditorium, a submarine and a cathedral — all painted by hand and fitted with sound and projection equipment: a Gesamtkunstwerk. Here, the artists produced a twelvehour performance, with a new version each time tailored to the situation that was put together from two hundred hours of material that they had prepared. The audience was both catered for and tormented, they watched films and listened to concerts: no two evenings were the same. The people sat there in the middle of this entirely constructed world within the world.
It was immersive and often boring too, which is also immersive: they didn’t know what was happening until they were caught up in a kind of frenzy. Any kind of art can be immersive because art induces us to feel connected, to change our perspective and to plunge into the story, the situation and the mood of the people we are watching. When you cry in the theatre, of course you know you are in a theatre, but you are suddenly struck by the realisation that life is just like in theatre. And that’s what we look for in art — and have done so from the very beginning, since Aeschylus. In my view, the recent attention paid to the phenomenon of »immersion” is linked to the arrival of new technologies in our everyday lives, where new service and tracking features have had a powerful influence. Here, digital media are much better at creating what began in painting with trompe l’œil and the invention of panoramas and planetariums. Through online gaming, digital natives are used to encountering open worlds in the digital space and being able to play an independent role within them. Moving within immersive environments doesn’t mean losing yourself, but simply being able to connect with a lot more.
NP: Can you tell me a bit about the process of the »Immersion” series from its inception up until now, and maybe about how the choice of works devel- oped? How did you choose what fits together and what qualifies as an immersive art work?
TO: There is no real equivalent of the word »immersion” in the German language. Five or six years ago, the term immersion was hardly ever used in everyday speech. In English if you say that something is immersive, it doesn’t necessarily have to be something to do with art. But we don’t have a word that’s comparable in German. We might perhaps call something »eindringlich”, but in English »immersion” has a much broader range of associations—stretching from methods of learning a language to the way a museum is designed. In Germany, it’s a term that only slowly established itself in the sciences and in the art scene during the 1990s, strongly influenced by the development of new media. And that’s how I came across it.
I attended a workshop at the interna- tional literature festival berlin where young game designers were talking about adapting novels and every time they demonstrated a moment in their game that was particularly smartly constructed, they talked about an »immersive situation”. I was surprised by this new word— which was new to me personally — that they used to describe their artistic experience as well as their intentions. So, we started developing a programme that used this term as a tool. Because it leads to comparable phenomena in various different fields of contemporary art, music, philosophy and science.
It was an encounter with a kind of artistic production that represents a great challenge to the traditional infrastructure of museums and theatres. We started by producing an exhibition by Omer Fast that involved performers and which was intended to create a new concept for presenting his art films. Omer Fast wanted to create environments in which the films could be presented as they might be watched in everyday life — on screens in a waiting room, for example, or at an airport. So together with a stage designer he constructed hyper-realistic everyday rooms in the Martin-Gropius- Bau where his films were embedded. The first thing that I learned then about the phenomenon of immersion was that it is always linked to the construction of a special kind of space. Immersive works are space-based works. And then we transposed the idea of immersion to very different areas: in our project »Limits of Knowing” we explored alternative forms of knowledge and science. For this, we worked with astrophysicists from LIGO in California, who then recruited artists to translate their counterintuitive theories into worlds that could be experienced. We also tried to understand social processes such as German reunification as an immersive process, looking at the disappearance of the border and the coalescence of two very different political systems with different eyes. Our last project examined climate change because the climate is an immersive system that we cannot escape from — we influence it just as it influences us every day. In the climate system there is no exterior. For us, immersion does not mean that the museum walls shake and dust is scattered from the ceiling when we visit an exhibition about earthquakes, it means shaking up the world of the museum itself. The notion of immersion is our probe to tell how the world of politics, the economy and theatre is being shaken up.
NP: When I was studying your pro- gramme from the last few years, I came across Mariano Pensotti / Grupo Marea’s Diamante, which the Berliner Festspiele co-produced and presented in 2019. I liked the concept of a »trial society” («Testgesellschaft») as you call it, in which art, an immersive performance, is used as a chance to try out a model, to experiment and to persuade people to imagine or experience a world that they are not part of in their daily lives, or to live a kind of parallel life to this »trial society”. How do you think experiencing this kind of work as a participant might influence our perception of the future in today’s society?
TO: I devised the term »Testgesellschaft / trial society” because forms of theatre like those of SIGNA or Punchdrunk constitute a genre of their own. Normally in the theatre you observe something but you don’t try it out yourself. But, for me, it’s this moment of trying it out that’s crucial. We normally pay actors to try out something new when dealing with a text, on the basis of something old. I’ve written a book about this »life on trial”. Theatre was invented as a trial space, but only for those who create theatre. In rehearsal they can try out alternative worlds, and subsequently they can repeat and vary their experiences within stable structures. And we watch. But that changes if you enter the space. Then something happens for the visitors that otherwise only happens in rehearsal.
For visual artists it happens in the studio, for theatre people it happens in rehearsal, and in immersive worlds we can suddenly all do it. Together with others, we can change the rules of the game without suffering any harm. This privileged form of encounter with a world that knows no punishment, no denial, is something the public normally only experience the results of. But the process takes place in the background, in the dark, it happens in a secret location, a vulnerable space that is well hidden and protected. This is why studios and rehearsal rooms are generally taboo for the public and nobody is allowed inside except those who are taking part in the process. Immersive forms of art now open up this trial world to the public. In a certain way this is only simulated, but in many respects it does actually happen. That is why to begin with we also called our »Immersion” programme a series of projects about »digital culture in the analogue arts”. I didn’t want to go looking for this trial situation in the loneliness of the VR goggles experience, but to show worlds where artists created spaces for collective experiences — exhibitions, theatres, planetariums: you’re not alone there. Even if that means some- thing very different today. One can enter these spaces, they take us one step away from — to use Michel Foucault’s term — a disciplinary society, from what happens in a traditional black box theatre: you sit in your seat, you’re silent, you don’t move, you don’t make any jokes, and in a way you are completely absent in order to be present. In a disciplinary society, we are treated and trained as part of a collective. In a society of checks,
by contrast, everything feels much more liberal — continuing to use the theatre metaphor, I am able to go wherever and apparently also whenever I want. But here you are checked all the time—every minute. In traditional theatre, the job of the director finishes the moment the premiere happens. Normally the director will then go home: everything is done, the machine has been built, it works and the actors take over. But in this immersive world, the actual art work begins the moment the audience enter. Only then does the director become active and control the effects in the space, manipu- lating the scenery and the timing. Here, everything is a kind of rehearsal run — for the audience, but also for the hidden supervisors of the action. This is an exploration of the rules by which power operates.
NP: Could you describe the experience that someone has when seeing the art work Diamante?
TO: To be honest, I really like Mariano Pensotti’s work Diamante, but it’s also rather old-fashioned. It’s interesting that Pensotti opens up the performance space for the audience, creating this huge installation with different buildings, each one for a different family or function that you can move freely between, but the audience remains in the position of an observer. You wander around the village, choose your own perspective and the sequence of scenes you see, but funda- mentally your own role is not that different from traditional theatre. You don’t enter the buildings: you look in through their large windows. What Pensotti created there feels more like a spatialised film. It would be different if you could really do something when asked to make a decision or engage in some form of conversation. That is something that happens from time to time in the performances of Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller. You can never feel secure in their worlds. It’s difficult to consume art passively there. This kind of »trial society” was pioneered by the Danish theatre company SIGNA, whose theatre sets reveal, even without actors, how narrative spaces are also rooted in interaction and contain participatory structures. We were interested in how artists use surveillance and feedback spaces of this kind as tools of liberation. And to do this they often lead us into rather dark areas of life, through real depths, but also into zones of unsuspected empathy with other people, worlds and areas of knowledge. As well as that, there is still this more traditional, dialectical structure of »I am here, and you are there, and that is a distinctly separate, different side of reality.” Most people experience theatre in precisely this way, as an event behind the fourth wall — and that’s also very artful and interesting. Immersion unleashes these worlds and at the same time controls them in even more cunning ways.
I think this is the reason why I am interested in immersive theatre—and also in a different kind of exhibition design that has been a large part of my work and the work of the team in recent years. If you really spend time thinking about the formats of exhibitions and theatre works and not their content, as
is usually the case, then something very radical happens—you start to highlight the structures of power and violence within the format and therefore the institution itself, and that is a gamechanger.
NP: What’s new about these power structures?
TO: Exhibiting something in the traditional structure of Western culture means taking it out of its usual contexts. Exhibitions are based on extraction.
The same way that modernism treats everything — raw materials, information, technology. In pre-modern times, objects that are now regarded as works of art were embedded in religious contexts or those of practical living. With modernism, the idea of the object developed: making a fetish of the thing in isolation, which led to the invention of the white cube, the picture on a white wall or the exhibit in a glass case. Here the visitor stands facing the object, everything seems neutral and free. You don’t think about the situation of the object, or about your own situation. You are part of a structure that gives you the feeling of being an individual who can choose your own path, your own speed and everything else for yourself. We believe that under these conditions we see things as they really are. But the opposite of this could be true. Museums organise this experience differently than theatre. While in the museum the exhibition and the experience of the visitors is based on space, in the theatre their experience is time-based. What happens on stage is prescribed by the play and its timing. A couple of years ago now, we started to devise time-based exhibitions. That doesn’t mean we presented time-based works in exhibitions, but rather that we dramatised the format itself and combined it with a script. For this, we developed modules with different entry and exit systems, which welcomed the visitors and recognised their presence. And that changes the nature of the format quite fundamentally. In an exhibition by Philippe Parreno, the art work is not the object on the wall but the structure that includes you, that makes you a component in the system. This is very complicated technically but at the same time it’s also magical because you feel: »Wow, this is a living organism, and I’m part of this life.”
NP: When we think about immersion in relation to traditional media, such as cinema and television, there is something escapist about it, such as the fact that you can immerse yourself completely and almost forget where you are. I wonder how you see the relationship between the escapism of total immersion and putting aside the blinkers and directly confront- ing difficult themes through immersive works. To what extent do you have the feeling that the work invites those taking part to realise both, instead of only temporarily escaping from everyday life?
TO: What does escapism mean? My intuitive answer would be that you escape into reality, not into something else. It’s nothing other than reality, but it’s a different kind of reality. It’s not not real, no matter where you go. So, if you think: »Oh, that might be an interesting perspective,” then you’re not leaving the world behind, you’re just walking into a different one. Something being immersive, not in a genre sense but in its aesthetic effect, means that an art work offers us the opportunity to enter a different space — a different world. Every art form achieves this kind of world- building — in every novel, in every stage play, whether it’s abstract or realistic, a world is always created within the world, especially when we see works that originate in an immersive genre from a technical point of view. Immersion is always connected to a process of world-building. The strange situation is created of being in two worlds simultaneously. Wearing a pair of VR goggles, a body sits on a chair, while our inner self is busy moving through a digital reality inside a different body. Whenever something becomes more intense, we are in two spaces at the same time. Like in a dream. It feels completely real, and it is real — but different. In a situation like this, the art-based experience is not escapism, but an extension of our existence into additional spaces. It might be more intense »over there” or it might be more boring, but doors open, and what awaits us behind them is a different experience of the here and now. Meditation is also immersion, love is immersion: everything that is profound and intense is immersive. Immersion suspends the boundary between the »I” in ourselves and in the world under certain circumstances that cannot be made permanent. Sadly, we are not loved permanently, only some of the time. Why that is the case, I don’t know. Or where this fear of fusion comes from, why we fear escapism and say: »Oh, we’re leaving something behind.” But we’re not losing anything—we’re just entering something different.
NP: Losing something in the sense of …
TO: Control.
NP: Consciousness.
TO: What we call reality. Critical distance. Everything we’ve been taught. The modern mental system has spent decades and centuries training our minds to associate knowledge with distance, and perception with rationality. During this time, many great discoveries came about through dreams, and we have come to make a lot of decisions more intuitively as a result of holistic, emotionallyled calculation.
NP: How has your work on the concept of immersion over the years affected the way you personally view the intersec- tions between art and technology?
TO: I don’t believe in forward progress, I believe in intensity and the feeling of being connected or not. Normally we say that immersion means we forget the media that connect us with the other side of the world, and at that moment we immerse ourselves — we forget the book or the film, we’re in it. But nobody forgets the media, we simply enjoy the media. And at the same time, it makes us smarter to think about what media are. Even if I take off the VR goggles, I’m still wearing a pair of goggles in my head. This is what these technologies can teach us and also enable us to enjoy. Personally, I don’t like having those clunky VR goggles on my nose. But at the moment it is the only way of enhancing physical reality with a different one and finding a connection with these intense worlds without taking drugs or meditating excessively. I believe I appreciate the connection in itself, because it brings me closer to life, the life of everything, of plants, animals, humans, the reality that surrounds me. I believe immersion connects us and that is very valuable in a time in which we are discovering that the way we treat the earth, taking so much out of it that we only see in terms of resources, as raw material to be used up, has caused and is causing a great deal of damage. And perhaps immersion is a way of overcoming this evil and cultivat- ing the holistic understanding that we always exist in relation to the things that surround us, and these things have souls, which is self-evident for all animistic cultures.
NP: What do you think about the effects and role of technology with regard to the fact that the hardware is constantly changing, the software is constantly changing and the ecological effects associated with this? How do you reflect on these things and how is your relationship with the artists who work with new technologies?
TO: You’ll be surprised, but we don’t have that much to do with people who work with new technologies. It was primarily through two projects that our programme series highlighted the theme of ecology and sustainability. In one, we relied on a form of technology that exists worldwide: planetariums. A planetarium is a space in which people started to develop digital projection and sound systems more than 30 years ago. Long before virtual reality became a medium to be taken seriously, people working in planetariums knew how to control dynamic images that fill our complete field of vision and to synchronise these with spatialised sound. We decided to open these spaces up for contemporary artists and paid them to delve into the technology that had been developed for planetariums and to integrate their art into this infrastructure, because there is a global, planetary infrastructure which is highly immersive. The planetarium is built for immersion. It was invented a hundred years ago in order to create an experience of infinity delivered through technology that always arises when the infinite space of the starry sky opens above our heads. It is a wonderful, hi-tech space that was built to play with this infinity, to explore its most varied constellations, and to this extent plane- tariums are also trial worlds. At the same time, they establish a connection that is almost archaic. Their perspective is planetary, always based on the whole. This is something they share with the last exhibition we produced. It was called »Down to Earth”, after a book about climate change by Bruno Latour. For this project, we not only decided to show works about the theme, but to change our own operating system, for example, not to use any electricity, any video screens, any spotlights or any micro- phones. All the rooms were lit by daylight only. We took no flights: everyone travelled by train. Instead of oil-based ink, we only used black algae-based pigment, and we made all our resource usage public. We invited artists to work with live musicians and choral singers instead of playing recordings from laptops. That changed the atmosphere entirely. The effect was very powerful, though not as a result of expensive technology, but rather the opposite.
NP: Can you tell me a little about what you are working on at the moment and which issues you want to explore?
TO: The »Immersion” project comes to an end this year because our budget is running out. The last thing I am working on for the Berliner Festspiele is the temporary reopening of the International Congress Centre Berlin (ICC). The ICC was the biggest and most expensive building in West Berlin, and it has been closed for over ten years. It looks like a space ship and has the largest auditoria in the city. Here, we want to organise a COVID exorcism and, in this utopian architecture that is now sleeping and able to dream once again, to practice a different approach to this legacy of epic exploitation of the earth’s resources.
NP: You said before that you don’t believe in forward progress. What do you mean by that?
TO: I think, as far as our relationship to the planet goes, the Neolithic period was much more progressive. Perhaps, as Terence McKenna said, a kind of neo-archaic age has begun. We learn from indigenous peoples: we learn from those who have survived us. Of course, there is progress in our social relationships, in protecting the individual — from but also through institutional power structures. That is the daily struggle. But the kind of progress we generally mean when we talk about progress has ruined the world. We should stop thinking like that. Progress is what is good for us, but not just for us human beings, but for the terrestrial system, for Gaia, for the inhabitants of Gaia.
NP: Would you like to add anything more about your experiences with the theme of immersion in general?
TO: Immersion is a perspective, not a technology. Immersion is a way of life, it is also the structure that takes the capitalist system to a new level because it is connected to the extraction of entirely different resourcesour data, relationships, every stirring of life, everything that can be tracked and made use of. That is why many people sense that this theme has something to do with them. They are constantly connected with something that follows them — like ghosts in the imagination of people in the past — and feeds off of them like a demon. And if they turn their backs on it, they will end up in an immersive domain anyway, because everything that carries us away from this world of extraction and consumption also tends to break down boundaries. However, at Berliner Festspiele our interest is a different one from that of industry. It’s not about overpowering people. We seek to understand immersion in the way that the inhabitants of the rain forest do, as an experience of connection and shared responsibility that is highly complex, highly multifaceted—something that is dangerous and has to be constantly renegotiated. This is what we have attempted to do more or less explicitly with many artists and colleagues.
NP: Could you elaborate a little further on the difference between the capitalist notion of immersion and a traditional, indigenous version?
TO: I think the capitalist view of immersion is shaped by denying protected zones or the equal rights of all participants. Your private life, your emotions, your data, information about your behaviour, everything becomes extractable material that is used by people to make money. Just like in any immersive structure, there are no boundaries. It is a cybernetic system of give and take, but they take more than they give. It no longer only destroys the material environment, but it exploits the living nature of human beings themselves. We can therefore learn something above all from those people who have survived us and our colonial structures. The future is theirs if we are going to talk about progress.
»Worlds Without Exteriors. Immersion 2016–2021” (original German: »Welten ohne Außen. Immersion 2016–2021”) is based on a conversation by the writer, film director and podcast producer for the Magnéto platform Nancy Pettinicchio with Thomas Oberender that was conducted for the Goethe-Institut of North America’s podcast series »The Big Ponder”. Published in: Thomas Oberender (Ed): «CHANGES Formats Digital Culture Identity Politics Immersion Sustainability», Verlag Theater der Zeit, Berlin 2022
Thanks to Michael Krell; Excerpts from this conversation has been used in: «The big ponder» Podcast @ Goethe Institut Montreal