ABSTRACT
Oliver Grau stresses that immersive art strategies tend to completely surround their recipients; they tend to destroy distance and thus completely overwhelm any kind of distanced spectatorship. This chapter highlights two characteristics: the loss of distance and the individuality of the art event’s perception. The work of Lundahl & Seitl, Symphony of a Missing Room, which was shown at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in 2016 as part of the Immersion programme, takes the characteristics to a temporary extreme: visitors are blinded and deafened to any real-world surroundings. The chapter utilises the fruitful connection to the sociological method of ethnography: a well-known research method that corresponds with the mentioned claims since ethnography promises to travel between immersion and distance, between ‘going native’ and ‘coming home’. Immersive art seems to honour the promise of the artwork’s autonomy: any ‘heteronomous’ moment of the receptive process can be forgotten in immersive worlds.
