The interest in immersion as a model for aesthetic experiences that involve «walking into artworks» rather than observing them at a distance has gained interest from creators, curators, and audiences over the last decade. Yet, the issues brought up by the immersion understood as digital-technologically mediated experiences, have remained unresolved. In particular, questions of absorption/saturation versus reflection/critical distance and how immersive environments produce knowledge and experience based on the role and presence of audiences'/participants' bodies, continue to shape discussions among art historians, anthropologists, sociologists of science in addition to practitioners. This keynote explores the question of why artworks that «forego history in the name of a kind of intensity of experience» (as Rosalind Krauss once wrote) have become so popular in an age of increasing loss between fiction and reality, the physical world and its digital doppelgänger.
Chris Salter is Professor for Immersive Arts and Director of the Immersive Arts Space at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). He is also Professor Emeritus, Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montreal and former Co-Director of the Hexagram network for research-creation in arts, cultures and technology and Co-Founder of the Milieux Institute at Concordia. He studied philosophy and economics and completed his PhD in theatre studies with research in computer music at Stanford University. His artistic work has been seen all over the world at such venues as the Venice Architecture Biennale, Barbican Centre, Berliner Festspiele, Wiener Festwochen, HeK, ZKM, Kunstfest Weimar, Musée d’art Contemporain, Muffathalle, EXIT Festival and Grand Palais Immersif-Paris, among many others. He has given more than 100 keynotes and talks in academic and cultural institutions internationally and is the author of Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance ( 2010), Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making (2015) and Sensing Machines (2022), all from MIT Press.
Keynote speaker:
Prof. Dr. Christopher Salter
Website:
blog.zhdk.ch/immersivearts
When?
4 March 2026
6:30 pm
Where?
Swissnex in San Francisco
Pier 17
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