What Will the “Metaverse” Do to Art and Culture?

jacobinmag.com/2022/01/immersive-art-entertainment-virtual-reality-vr-metaverse

By
Adam Stoneman

By privileging immediacy and affect, virtual and augmented reality require us to submit to our
senses. But culture is not just a matter of feeling — it is also a way of knowing and
understanding the world.

Mark Zuckerberg demonstrates a virtual reality headset during a press event. (David Paul Morris /
Bloomberg via Getty Images)

What does it mean to view a work from within? I recently experienced Hieronymus
Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights in virtual reality at a local museum. Strapping on the
headset, I rolled forward on an invisible track through bright green hills, past animated
cutouts of vengeful angels and hybrid creatures, jolting and waving. I gawked at the world of
Bosch lit up like Christmas lights.

The journey came to a stop after about five minutes, and I pulled off the goggles, blinked,
and rubbed my eyes. The tingle of nausea gave way to a sense of disappointment with the
low-grade graphics and clunky animation. It was hardly the shiny future promised to us in

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recent films like Ready Player One, and certainly not a place I would like to spend
considerable time. With the original triptych across the sea in the Prado in Madrid, it felt
misleading to have this in a museum, like billing a fairground ghost ride as an exhibition
about the afterlife.

Bosch VR, a 3D adaptation of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. (BDH Immersive)

Virtual and augmented reality technologies are part of a growing multibillion-dollar industry,
highlighted by Mark Zuckerberg’s recent rebranding of Facebook as Meta and his plans
to build the metaverse — a virtual world that exists in tandem with the physical world in
which we are to “live, play, and work.” However, beneath the noise and publicity surrounding
this announcement, something else has escaped our attention: the more subtle ways in
which virtual reality as a symbolic form — a model for the world and how we think about it —
is increasingly manifested in culture with the rise of immersive forms of theater, films, music,
and art.

The “immersive entertainment” industry, which includes nondigital experiences such as

escape rooms and other content in which the participant feels a sense of presence in an
artificial environment, is large and growing, spanning contexts such as live events, arts
performances, and museums. DesignMyNight currently lists no less than thirty-one different
immersive experiences in London, from an Alcatraz prison cocktail bar to a “Wizard
Exploratorium.” In 2019, the US immersive cultural industry was valued at $61 billion.

The UK has seen the commercial success of companies that specialize in immersive film
screenings (Secret Cinema), theater (Punchdrunk), and, increasingly, live music. There is a
profitable industry trading in Van Gogh experiences (five separate companies are operating
pop-ups in cities across the world in 2021, two of them in London). Here visitors “step inside”
a Van Gogh painting — typically a disused factory space projected with images of his
paintings — occasionally supplemented with scents to “transport people to orchards,
gardens and fields.” What does it mean to “enter” an artwork? Since scale, composition, and
color are impossible to gauge, the one destination that is off-limits is the actual paintings
themselves.

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 Save Every Breath, the Dunkirk VR experience. (Warner Bros Pictures)

Punchdrunk’s brand of immersive theater takes a Choose Your Own Adventure approach in
which the audience individually explores a multistory set, leading to myriad combinations of
narratives and experiences. While an atomized experience like this can be exciting for each
participant, it inevitably replaces the social phenomenon of experiencing the same
performance together, individualizing experiences that were previously shared.

Whether it is through a VR headset, the manipulation of projectors, or clever set design,

immersion fulfills our desire for escapism, instantly transporting us to far-flung, exotic worlds
conveniently differentiated by genre: aliens, dinosaurs, cowboys, zombies, steampunk.
Excitement and wonder in a familiar imaginary, this mode of immersive entertainment is a
suspension of the present rather than an exploration of hypothetical futures.

As the protagonist of Ready Player One says after strapping on a headset, “You don’t need a
destination when you’re running on an omnidirectional treadmill.” For Raymond Williams,
popular science fiction represented “desire displaced by alienation” — the transformation it
offers is not a social or moral one but that of nature itself: “alternative society is on the moon
of a far planet.”

Van Gogh Alive exhibition at the Wellington Waterfront, New Zealand (4nitsirk/Flickr)

Influenced by video games and fantasy role-playing, experiments in VR cinema enable

viewers to choose where to look in any given scene and interact with objects and characters.
Save Every Breath, a VR adaptation of Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk, sits the viewer
literally in the pilot seat as missiles and bullets tear through the sky. One hundred and
twenty-six years of cinema history and we are back at La Ciotat station watching the Lumière
brothers’ train arrive.

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Indeed, VR moviemaking is still wrestling with fundamental problems like “narrative paradox,”
when individual agency and customization of the viewer compromises the director’s control
of the narrative (the gamebook format is not widely used in literary fiction for this reason),
and viewer FOMO, anxiety at missing important elements of the story, leading to frustration
and low emotional engagement.

A good book, play, or film can be absorbing, enabling our imaginations to engage and take
flight, but rarely does it envelop us; there is still space for reflection and contemplation. By
privileging immediacy and affect, immersion requires us to submit to our senses. But culture
is not just a matter of feeling. It is also a way of knowing and understanding the world. The
immersive precludes the discursive by collapsing the distance needed for critique.

The image of former Guantanamo detainee Mohammed El Gharani is projected onto what Laurie
Anderson calls a “film sculpture” in her multimedia work Habeas Corpus.

Are there more creative and progressive potentials in immersive culture? In Laurie
Anderson’s recent VR work Chalkroom, created with Hsin-Chien Huang, the viewer flies
through an enormous black structure made of words, drawings, and stories. The inherent
qualities of disembodiment, dislocation, and isolation are embraced as qualities of the work.

In Habeas Corpus, Anderson used telepresence to beam in former Guantanamo prisoner

Mohammed el Gharani, who is still barred from entering the United States despite being
released without charge in 2010. His live virtual presence as part of an immersive installation
had a clear political message. By maximizing the possibilities for disembodiment and
presence inherent in the technology, Anderson opens new creative modes for immersive
technology. Yet the structural logic of the culture industry leaves more experimental,
challenging work like this on the margins.

The technologies we produce also produce us, shaping not only what culture is but how we
experience it. Immersive experiences should not replace communal and discursive forms of
culture, or enjoying and discussing work together. As immersion becomes an increasingly
dominant cultural paradigm, it is important to pull off the headset, step outside, and
resurface.

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