"The distinction between theme parks and urban venues is rapidly dissolving"

As "immersive experiences" continue to proliferate, Shane Reiner-Roth considers the implications for our relationship with architecture and the built environment.

It was not long ago that advancements in OLED displays, projection-mapping and digital signage appeared to be the key to reinvigorating art and architecture, as well as public interest in both of these fields.

In her 2011 book Kissing Architecture, the architectural theorist Sylvia Lavin catalogues examples of "superarchitecture", which she defines as "architecture in contact with incommensurable forms of time, movement and immateriality that coalesce to produce socially enveloping and therefore political effects".

We are seeing "immersive experiences" pop up in nearly every city with a tourism economy

The video artwork of "superarchitects", including Pipilotti Rist and Doug Aitken, is not only projected onto architecture by "kissing" its surfaces, but intensifies architectural effects by allowing the legibility of both forms of media to "give way to the experience of perception itself".

The ability of superarchitecture to socially envelop audiences, in other words, would encourage the public to slow down their daily pace, pay attention to the finer details of the built environment and, perhaps, even reevaluate their responsibility to one another as they co-inhabit public space.

But we haven't heard a lot about "superarchitecture" in the 13 years since Kissing Architecture was published. In its place, we are seeing "immersive experiences" pop up in nearly every city with a tourism economy.

Instead of video artists receiving commissions to "kiss" the surfaces of public space, the work of the great painters of the public domain – including Hieronymous Bosch, Picasso and Monet – is cast onto the characterless surfaces of warehouse interiors for a substantial admission fee. Circles are sometimes projected onto the ground as a post-Covid measure, allowing visitors to occupy the same space without the threat of social interaction.

In the hands of for-profit companies, Van Gogh's Starry Night is no longer a painting to be interpreted. Like Frankenstein's monster, it is an image to be shocked with a million volts for public consumption. Painterly details, originally so small they require a magnifying glass to be appreciated, are scaled up beyond all subtlety. The movement once implied by gestural brush strokes has been made literal through video animation. The aura is gone, but the buzz is overwhelming.

Many recently developed live-performance venues have additionally been designed to flood the senses by affixing LED screens to reductive volumes, minimising architectural massing to an obligatory secondary character.

Seamless, wraparound screens may soon dethrone the flat screen of the movie theatre as the primary urban-entertainment venue

In Las Vegas, for instance, the Madison Square Garden Company recently spent a whopping $2,300,000,000 on the Sphere, a dome designed by Populous whose only architectural significance is that it is the largest spherical building in the world. Technologically, however, the Sphere is a marvel: a 160,000-square-foot (15,000-square-metre) LED screen – the highest-resolution one in the world – wraps around its interior.

The 17,000 ticket-holders are encouraged to look upwards, rather than at one another or even the musicians performing on stage. When the Grateful Dead performed at the Sphere during their weeks-long residency, with tickets starting at $145 and steadily going up from there, who was the star of the show: the Grateful Dead, or the Sphere?

Though its 580,000-square-foot (54,000-square-metre) LED screen exterior most commonly serves as a digital billboard for any company able to fork over $450,000 for four hours of screen time, it has occasionally been handed over to at least one video artist, Refik Anadol.

But like the first silent movies, whose depictions of dreams and magic principally served to demonstrate the capabilities of the new visual medium, Anadol's swirling animations were largely advertisements of the Sphere's technical prowess. The distinction between theme parks and urban venues is rapidly dissolving as more versions of the Sphere begin to pop up in major American cities and beyond.

Cosm, a technology company specialising in planetariums and science centres, has recently opened up what are essentially walk-in televisions in Los Angeles and Dallas with a 1,500-person capacity. For several times the price of a beer at a sports bar (and, in some cases, several times the price of a seat at a sports stadium), one can instead get "immersed" in live basketball matches.

The seamless, wraparound screens which, Cosm claims, make you feel "like you're courtside at an NBA game or traveling to a world beyond your own", may soon dethrone the flat screen of the typical movie theatre as the primary urban-entertainment venue, especially given that more people are opting to avoid crowds altogether by streaming movies at home.

In these "immersive experiences", Van Gogh, Anadol, the Grateful Dead and basketball stars all play second fiddle to screen devices

For those in attendance without an interest in football, the technological spectacle is likely enough to keep them occupied. In these "immersive experiences", Van Gogh, Anadol, the Grateful Dead and basketball stars all play second fiddle to screen devices that, through their scale and technological sophistication alone, have the power to occupy our attention any time we turn away from our phones.

They count on us being so consumed by the changeability of screen devices, and so desensitised to the relative stillness of everything else, that they become the eternal flame to our moth-like attention while burning a hole in our pockets.

And as soon as these screens are no longer noteworthy, ceasing to be "immersive" enough to justify astronomical ticket prices, they will respond by becoming more spectacular, more engrossing, more pulsating, until the built environment that surrounds them seems unbearably inert by comparison.

Shane Reiner-Roth is a writer, photographer, curator and educator. He is a lecturer at the University of Southern California and is studying for a PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in Dezeen, The Architect's Newspaper, Architectural Record and Architectural Digest.

The photo is by Tan Yang Song via Shutterstock.

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