Immersive Art Exhibitions: Spellbinding, or Forgettable?

The sculpture, S.2122, looks like a large glass box that contains a futuristic building and the water and sky around it. The building’s foundation is submerged in water, which will rise every five years until, 25 years from now, the building and the people living in it are completely submerged. It’s a visual reminder of the climate crisis, and a testament to the artist’s belief that humanity will survive and adapt to the chaos.

The museum also owns a piece by Refik Anadol and has installed a 360-foot-long screen with built-in technology for a permanent exhibition on Nanjing’s history. The immersive exhibition animates a scene depicted on a Qing dynasty-era scroll: a cityscape of Nanjing over 1,000 years ago, with scholars, merchants, peddlers and other characters in the scene coming to life as museum-goers walk by.

In Switzerland, there is an entire laboratory dedicated to the development of immersive exhibitions. At the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Sarah Kenderdine, a professor of digital museology, and her team are researching the best ways to use digital technology for better curatorship, whether by encouraging museum visitors to interact with the exhibits and each other or by finding better ways for the public to access a museum’s collection.

Over the past 25 years, Ms. Kenderdine has produced immersive interactive exhibitions of all kinds. She has worked with Aborigines and the National Museum of Australia to tell the dreamtime story of the seven sisters, developed new interactive ways of accessing a trove of archival footage of 5,400 musicians playing jazz, blues and Latin music, and used digital technology to allow more people to access vital — but delicate — cultural treasures, such as the Mogao caves at Dunhuang in China.

In her work, she’s often found that a combination of human interaction and digital immersion proves most successful in engaging audiences, such as when a docent led a digital tour of the Mogao caves in real time.

“Artistic experimentation or experimentation in general is so vital,” said Ms. Kenderdine, in discussing how the “father of video art” Nam June Paik’s work in the 1970s informed the way we experience things now, and where technology might go. “Often, you see the future coming through these different lenses of art.”