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IMMERSION

Immersion can be experience on physiological, emotional and intellectual levels.

Immersion often involves a journey:

• film
• literature
• ikea
• music
• sport
• rides
• VR & video games
• Youtube channel (& suggestions)
• our lives (narrativisation)

Immersion uses rewards to focus attention – sounds, points etc

Can combine goal based rewards with a journey – give meaning behind engagement

employ other senses to add value / percieved quality – unconsciously adding to the experience – eg influence through baking scent in new house

• sound
• light / texture
• scent
• movement
• cheerleaders, mascots, hot dogs & beer at sports

This monopolises attentionthrough bullying & seduction:

• strength of logic (pattern, form)
• intrigue (dreams, surreality)
• force (rides)
• stimulating competitive drive
• dynamic range / contrastive valence
• addiction

The Brain assesses streams of data for meaning and significance – you can coerce the audience to project importance / meaning onto the media – without having to actually have or convey meaning. Many immersive experiences draw on our evolutionary priming to trick us into particular states – emotion, attention.

 

Definitions of Immersion – Deep engagement (sensorial engulfment) with as stimulus

Often requires suspension of disbelief.

 

THREE MODES OF LISTENING

CAUSAL – listening to a sound in order to gather information about its cause (or source)

SEMANTIC – listening to a code or language to interpret a message

REDUCED – listening that focuses on the traits of the sound itself, independent of its cause and meaning – pioneered in France

Shift from semantic to reduced modes of listening – repeating a phrase again and again and again – once semantic meaning has been extracted, other things such as pattens, pitch, melody and rhythm are noticed – the paralinguistic codes of language begin to be noticed.

VISION

Same applies to vision as well as sound – film, theatre, video games.

Immersive film – the space between the eye and the screen (the void) falls away.

 

Holl Reading 

Immersion – trance like state

• Cinema is connected to the nervous system – the filmmaker can exploit this connection
• the gaze unconscouslt moves in the pictures and the shots of he photographic surface
• movements are conveyed as moments of motion assembled in the field of vision
• experimental filmmakers liberated the body from popular discourse

 

Early 50 second documentary like films 

Tom Gunning – we should approach film today as they did when it was first created – a disregard for cinematic tradition

 

EMBODIED SUBJECTIVITY 

Perspective

• a way for the audience’s perspective to be aligned with a character in the film – your perspective, reactions, physical intellectual – are aligned with what’s on screen
• BORDERS – being made aware of the distance between you and what is being viewed – does it draw you in further or separate you out?
• CAMERA MOVEMENT – the way the content of the frame is re-oriented by the camera’s movement

 

Subjectivity & situation – the situation in which you’re experiencing the film etc will effect the experience.

 

Immersion only works when everything works together.