In October, I visited Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, founded by Alice Walton, in Bentonville, Arkansas. The impressive museum campus, designed by Moshe Safdie (great uncle to filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie) stands on some 120 acres of land near downtown Bentonville.
In Crystal Bridges, one of the most popular attractions is a work by Yayoi Kusama called Infinity Mirrored Room––My Heart is Dancing to the Universe. This installation from 2018 is one of many “infinity rooms” that Kusama produced over the course of her long and successful career. It can only be viewed by two people at a time, and it is not uncommon for long lines to form to experience it. For people who are too impatient to wait, the museum provides a 360 video of what it looks like inside Infinity Mirrored Room.
The museum streamlines the experience of this work. Each person or group may enter the installation for one minute, giving them time to take photos and briefly immerse themselves in the display of lights, shapes, and reflections. As you enter the room, you are enveloped by colorful globes suspended in darkness. The mirrors on the walls extend this vista into infinity. It is as if one is gazing into the stars in deep space.
As I looked at the line of people waiting to enter, I wondered what made Infinity Mirrored Room––My Heart is Dancing to the Universe more appealing to museumgoers than the other works in the collection, for example, a large canvas titled Retopistics: A Renegade Excavation by Julie Mehretu, situated just on the left as you exit the Kusama installation. (It seems the art world is suffering from the same malaise that has long haunted academia: two-part titles separated by colons or em dashes). Does it offer something new? Is it truly a more engaging experience than the one offered by a two-dimensional canvas? Does Kusama’s work present a better photo opportunity for social media? Is it a superior aesthetic sensation to be “in” the artwork rather than looking “at” it?
What if we view the immersive promise of Kusama’s work (being “in” rather than looking “at”) as a larger tendency in this cultural moment? Today music, film, and video games are praised for such immersive qualities: successful aesthetic experiences transport us, placing us in a simulated environment we are free to explore. Emerging technologies such as virtual reality, 360 video, and surround sound seek to create all-encompassing experiences that replace the spectator’s immediate surroundings with virtual ones.
Why are we so drawn to replacing our reality with simulated ones? Is it related to a desire to escape the tedium of daily life? This is too large a topic to tackle in this blog post, but I offer one critical perspective here, from the anthropologist Stefan Helmreich: “Immersion has come to suggest being submerged in a space as well as becoming one with it, dissolving into it. Immersion does not immediately open up questions of how boundaries are produced and crossed.”[1] Like the walls in an infinity room, the boundaries between self and surroundings also start to disappear: in truly immersive experiences, we don’t only lose sight of our surroundings, but also of ourselves.
The day after I visited Crystal Bridges, we discussed the introduction to Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler’s “Composing for the Films” in my Music and Film class. In this diatribe against the culture industry from 1947, Adorno and Eisler claim that in capitalism, all art has become entertainment insofar as its main function is to fill our leisure time. Art as entertainment functions to recharge us, restore our working capacity, and provide a shelter from the reality of engaging in alienating labor.[2] Immersive media fulfills this role quite well: it is the restorative entertainment par excellence that fuels labor power while placing us in environments foreign to us. Instead of provoking us to see the ways in which we, workers, are alienated, it provides an escape into virtual spaces. Every day, we are constantly reminded of how borders and boundaries are both enforced and violated, with civilians killed and displaced, while immersion in media typically creates the illusion that such borders don’t exist.
Several of my students argued that Adorno and Eisler’s view of the culture industry is too pessimistic, a view I share to some extent. Maybe immersive media does not necessitate a loss of the spectator’s agency. What if it can offer something beyond entertainment, a provocation to confront the realities of our world? What would such immersive experiences look, sound, or feel like?
[1] Helmreich, Stefan. “An Anthropologist Underwater: Immersive Soundscapes, Submarine Cyborgs, and Transductive Ethnography.” American Ethnologist 34, no. 4 (2007): 631. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2007.34.4.621.
[2] Eisler, Hanns, and Theodor W. Adorno. Composing for the Films. London: Continuum, 2007 [1947]: xxxv-xxxvi.