Christiane Paul on Immersion

The talk will trace the history of immersive environments in digital art and explore the degrees of immersion enabled by different platforms. Virtual and augmented realities, as well as enveloping projections, all rely on distinctive relationships between bodies and space. The challenges of negotiating boundaries between physical architectural space, simulated worlds, and embodied presence will be central topics of the presentation. The exhibition teamLab: Everything Exists in Infinite Continuity will be positioned within the larger context of immersive digital art, while paying attention to the cultural specificities of teamLab’s practice. Also discussed will be the tensions inherent in the simulation of reality and the natural environment and the effects of “naturalizing” the digital. Together, these themes illuminate the immersive turn in digital art and its impact on viewers’ critical distance, agency, and awareness of mediation.
Free; registration is encouraged.
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Christiane Paul is Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Professor Emerita at The New School. She is the recipient of the 2023 MediaArtHistories International Award and the Thoma Foundation’s 2016 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art. Her latest books are Digital Art (4th ed., 2023) and A Companion to Digital Art (Blackwell-Wiley, 2016). At the Whitney Museum she curated exhibitions including artport: A History of Internet Art (2026-27), Parting Worlds / Hyundai Terrace Commission: Marina Zurkow (2025), Harold Cohen: AARON (2024), Refigured (2023), and Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art 1965 – 2018 (2018/19) and is responsible for artport, the museum’s portal to internet art. Other curatorial work includes Chain Reaction (feralfile.com, 2023), DiMoDA 4.0 Dis/Location (traveling show, 2021-23), and The Question of Intelligence (Kellen Gallery, The New School, NYC, 2020).