IMMERSE! - Hatje Cantz

A two-column table of contents for a publication. The page is titled Table of Contents in a large, bold sans-serif font. The list is divided into sections including Introduction, Visual Essays, and Essays. Each entry includes the title of the work in bold, the author's name, and the page number on the right. Titles include On the Risk of Becoming a Fool, Brains Immersed in a Vat, and The Body Has Not Sunk. The layout is clean and minimalist on a white background.

An overhead shot of an open book or art catalogue. The spread shows two pages with black sans-serif text on a white background, discussing the relationship between art and technology. The page numbers 12 and 13 are visible at the bottom of the left page.

A split-panel image of a mysterious dark cube with glowing red symbols. On the left, the cube floats in a dark space surrounded by shattered fragments and green glowing polyhedra, with text stating Everybody shall be judged. The right panel is a close-up showing the cube's textured surface covered in intricate, glowing red geometric patterns.

A digital collage for Ami Clarke's work, Pandemonium. A jerboa leaps through a surreal, ruined cityscape under a purple sky. The scene is layered with transparent, circular graphics and text like UNPRECEDENTED and TRUST, plus a smartphone showing a track and trace app's Twitter feed. Text columns on the side describe the artwork's context.

A vertically split image with two panels. The left panel displays the James Webb Space Telescope's First Deep Field, showing thousands of galaxies of different sizes, shapes, and colors against the blackness of space. The right panel shows a black QR code on a plain white background.

A set of design notes for a project titled Fog of War, presented as white handwritten text and diagrams on a black background. On the left, notes discuss a circular chronology of events in a VR Mutilated Landscape scene. On the right, a diagram illustrates a user's 360-degree perspective, surrounded by icons of trees and crosses. The notes include questions about immersion, feelings, and sensory input in the experience.

A page layout with a block of text on the left and a digital artwork on the right. The artwork is a close-up portrait of a person with intense blue eyes. Their entire face, neck, and shoulders are covered in elaborate, swirling patterns that appear to be carved into their skin, revealing a reddish layer beneath.

A collage on a grey background features the repeated white text, THE CITY MUST BE ABOLISHED. Overlaid are various black-and-white images from the 1930 Soviet journal Sovremennaya arkhitektura, showcasing Disurbanist architectural plans, maps, and models created by the Constructivist group OCA.

A two-page spread of text from a publication, laid out in columns with a reddish-brown serif font. The text is academic in nature, discussing digital identity and perception. On the right page, a red-line diagram within an oval illustrates an optical scheme from Lacan's Seminar X. Footnotes are visible at the bottom of the pages.

A dense, vertically-split collage. The left side features dark, industrial textures, a framed abstract painting with fiery colors, and a grid of glowing red biological cells. The right side is composed of vintage anatomical illustrations of human heads, mouths, and tongues, layered over a surreal, distorted black-and-white portrait of a man holding his eye open against a schematic background.

A two-page spread from a book about new media and virtual reality. The right page features a section titled Immersion and a colorful painting by Gianluca Lerici, Net-surfer, showing a cartoonish figure wearing a VR headset while surfing inside a large blue wave against an orange sky.

A page from an article, laid out in two columns of text. The left column contains an inset color photograph of a woman with glasses and a white hat sitting on a wooden pew inside a large, historic stone church with arched windows and chandeliers. The text on the page discusses virtual reality, religion, and art, with a large heading on the right that reads The Need for Roots.

IMMERSE!

€ 28.00

VAT included. Shipping costs will be calculated at checkout

Edited by: Corina L. Apostol, Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás

March 2023, 184 Pages, 54 Photos

Paperback

169mm x 246mm

ISBN: 978-3-7757-5473-6

HATJE CANTZ VERLAG
Mommsenstr. 27
10629 Berlin
Germany
E-Mail: contact@hatjecantz.de

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As the opposition between illusion and reality dissolves and the boundaries between the world we inhabit and its virtual dimensions blur, Immerse! examines how computer-generated public spaces shape our current political and social discourses. What is the potential of virtual reality within the art field, when concepts such as presence and absence, material and immaterial are beginning to lose their validity?

Realized as part of the international research project Beyond Matter that explores the shift in the production and mediation of visual art within institutional frameworks. Exhibition spaces are physical locations of knowledge production and exchange, where spatial qualities play an important role in the contextualization of information. One of the goals of the project is to develop virtual productions that maintain these sensual qualities, but add layers of digitized and born-digital content to defy transience and the dependency on geographical locations, and create entirely new immersive experiences.

The catalogue offers the reflections on the theme by curators Corina L. Apostol and Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás as well as 19 visual essays by trailblazing artists and four in-depth theoretical texts by Helen Kaplinsky, Matthew Fuller, Lukáš Likavčan, Zsolt Miklósvölgyi and Márió Z. Nemes that explore the concept of immersion.