From Kusama to Superblue: the rise of immersive art

‘I like the quality of feeling that is felt not only with the eyes,’ said the pioneering Light and Space artist James Turrell in 1985. ‘My desire is to set up a situation to which I take you and let you see. It becomes your experience.’ Leap forward nearly 40 years and Turrell’s objectless art of experiences makes him a natural choice for the first slate of exhibitions currently filling a huge former warehouse in Miami occupied by Superblue, the new commercial venture exclusively dedicated to immersive installations. Here visitors can have their depth perception dizzyingly dissolved by one of Turrell’s ‘Ganzfelds’, the colored light works he has been fine-tuning since 1976.

Yet the big, participatory, and often technology-savvy kind of art that Turrell has been a trailblazer of now occupies a crowded and much-altered field. ‘We wanted to make a statement about the different opportunities that we have within this realm,’ says Superblue’s cofounder Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst of its debut program. As well as the Ganzfeld, there are vast interactive digital projections of streaming water and blooming red flowers, along with halls filled with floating clouds of real soap bubbles, courtesy of teamLab, the Japanese ‘interdisciplinary collective of artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians and architects,’ as its website says. Completing the lineup is an environmentally minded film and mirror maze by world-class set designer Es Devlin, whose clients have included Kanye West, Beyoncé, U2, London’s Royal Opera House and, most recently, Chanel, for whom she has just installed a forest in Miami’s Design District, which will open on the eve of Art Basel Miami Beach.

These works outline a generational shift that is about more than artists’ personal vision. Back in 1970, futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler prophetically wrote in their book Future Shock of a new ‘experiential industry’ where ‘consumers will collect experiences as […] passionately as they once collected things.’ It’s a prediction now applicable to chain restaurants, luxury boutiques, and high-end art installations, though it wasn’t until the release of the iPhone that the experience economy really began to seed. ‘Audiences are looking for meaning and identity and want to engage with more of their senses than just the eyes and fingertips that are locked to screens for much of the day,’ Devlin reflects, in a faint echo of Turrell’s 1985 musings.

In fact, Turrell remains an outlier in this rapidly evolving scene, with his sights set on an individual’s inner world and photography discouraged within his installations. Devlin and teamLab, on the other hand, actively court the collective in-person experience that is one of the few things unavailable online. ‘teamLab’s work reacts to people, so visiting it alone isn’t nearly as good,’ says Dent-Brocklehurst. That you will want to escape your screen and then record the experience on said screen is also a given. ‘teamLab have no interest in making merchandise, because what do you take away from [their work]? You take away the photograph of yourself at teamLab,’ she adds.

It’s somewhat remarkable that a front-runner of this tendency is Yayoi Kusama, whose dazzling mirror rooms that originated in the 1960s have become our era’s must-be-there. Around the world, gallery-goers have queued for hours to spend mere minutes within her reflective chambers, then post the moment on Instagram to prove they were there. Glenn Scott-Wright, co-director of Kusama’s London gallery, Victoria Miro, which has represented the artist for decades, recalls: ‘She once told me, “I want my art to be everywhere all the time.”’ Now social media has caught up with this dream of endless proliferation. As Scott-Wright says, ‘How we spread art’s message has changed quite radically and her work lends itself extremely well to that. It has universal appeal.’

At Superblue universal appeal looks key. The venture grew from Pace Gallery’s PaceX tech-art program, though Dent-Brocklehurst and Superblue cofounder Marc Glimcher, Pace Gallery’s CEO, say it’s a separate entity. Unlike traditional commercial galleries that place work with collectors or institutions, its funding model depends on tickets, with artists receiving royalties from sales. ‘Traditionally, when an artwork is shown to the public, it has already been chosen by someone else, a collector or museum [acquisitions committee],’ says Dent-Brocklehurst. ‘Here there’s a direct correlation between the artist and the audience.’ For this to function financially, a project’s appeal must reach far beyond art’s usual enthusiasts.

teamLab’s immersive museum Borderless, in Tokyo, which racked up nearly 2.2 million visitors in 2019, is one ‘revelatory business model,’ as Dent-Brocklehurst describes it, that Superblue took its cue from. The audience-expanding potential of big experiential art wasn’t discovered within its fledgling commercial sector however. In the past two decades, with state funding for public art institutions ever more dependent on footfall, pulling – some might say ‘pleasing’ – a crowd has increasingly become a must for their exhibition rosters.

Public art galleries fully awakened to the art-tech movement’s popular appeal in 2012 with the launch of Rain Room. The brainchild of the then unknown studio Random International, the indoors downpour in which people stayed miraculously dry thanks to sensors, was a watershed moment. It debuted at London’s Barbican and went on to draw crowds around the world, including at LACMA in 2015, where people queued in a record Californian drought to catch a glimpse of virtual rain. Its makers say the idea was to push at the bounds of ordinary experience – ‘How this disconnect between being immersed in, yet unaffected by, a rainstorm would actually feel, we had no idea where it would take us,’ the collective says.

For artists making immersive installations, the large, broad audiences they often garner are more than just a funding opportunity of course. Devlin’s decades working in theater, including on Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet for the National Theatre in 2015 and tours for pop’s megastars, have provided her with exceptional insight into ‘the terms of audience engagement,’ as she puts it. ‘In the sculptural installations, I am trying to work at the threshold between the theater’s curation of an audience’s time and a transferral of the role of protagonist to audience.’ Her installation Forest of Us (2021) at Superblue not only breaks the fourth wall but invites the audience through it when doors open within a film to reveal a real mirrored labyrinth. ‘A seated audience collectively absorbed in each beat of a film has now become a mobile community, a collage of fragmented reflections,’ she says of the translation from viewer to active agent.

Artists have explored the properties and conditions of their medium for centuries, and experiential art is no exception. Since Rain Room, Random International’s focus on technology’s possibilities for stretching human experience has expanded to reflect on its implications. ‘After eagerly exploring for millennia, [humans] are very suddenly and dramatically struggling to navigate the complexity that we have created with the help of technologies,’ the studio says. Produced by Superblue and BMW i, its recent installation No One is an Island (2020), for instance, used robotics and contemporary dance to investigate potential empathy between humans and machines.

Other innovators of its generation are using immersive technology to probe in the other direction, to reconnect with and amplify the organic world absent from many 21st-century lives. The Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s latest installation, Berl-Berl, at Berlin’s LAS, depends on technology that has evolved from the VR computer games he came of age playing in the late 1990s, to conjure a visceral primordial swamp inspired by research into wetland ecosystems and ancient folklore. ‘As humans, we need [a whole] sensorium and emotions to feel connected to the world,’ he says. ‘Sound, color, movement, collaboration – these are attributes of digital media. You can slow down time, see things beyond the naked eye, and create powerful ritualistic experiences.’

These sentiments are echoed by another Superblue collaborator, the Dutch Studio DRIFT, whose projects using tech it develops in-house include the flock of illuminated drones that mimicked bird murmuration above Miami Beach in 2017 and whose exhibition Fragile Future recently opened at The Shed in New York. Here installations include a cloud of swirling lights that copy the movement of elm seeds scattered in the wind and, referencing humanity’s natural habitat, floating blocks created to look like weathered concrete. ‘People are in their heads too much, disconnected from their body and the Earth,’ Studio DRIFT’s founders say. ‘We provide spaces where sharing in physical experiences becomes easy. Our work centers on movement, mimicking the natural rhythms found in nature and synchronizing these with bodily rhythms such as our heartbeat and our breath.’

As with other kinds of crowd-dependent culture, a nasty question mark briefly hung over experiential art’s prospects when the global pandemic hit. Superblue Miami’s opening, initially planned for late 2020, was pushed back to earlier this year. Now Dent-Brocklehurst can confidently point out, ‘The separation that we had from friends and family and the starvation of real-life art has made it all the more urgent. The best hit you can get to reimburse yourself is a multisensory experience, looking at art and engaging with other people. These artists really speak to that.’ Whether it’s the offer of a heightened group encounter, the chance – paradoxically – to reconnect with nature via high-tech, or simply an IRL marvel and a selfie, these installations have emerged as a defining art form du jour.

Captions for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1. Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Berl-Berl, 2021. Installation view at Halle am Berghain, 2021. © Timo Ohler. 2. Es Devlin, Forest of Us, 2021. Installation view of 'Every Wall is a Door', Superblue Miami, 2021. Photo by Andrea Mora. 3a (desktop view). Random International, Rain Room, 2015. In the collection of LACMA, LA. Exhibited courtesy of LACMA, RH, Restoration Hardware and The Hyundai Project: Art + Technology a joint initiative exploring the convergence of art and technology. Photo by Random International. 3b (mobile view). Random International, Rain Room, 2012. Exhibited at The Curve, Barbican, London. Courtesy of The Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art. Photo by Random International. 4. Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Berl-Berl, 2021. Installation view at Halle am Berghain, 2021. © Timo Ohler.