Barcelona Metropolis

Jordi Sellas
Director of the Centre d’Arts Digitals of Barcelona

We are moving towards a world where the rectangle is no longer the dominant container of information. For centuries, our visual media have been confined within the rectangular boundaries of books or screens. However, the rise of augmented reality technologies and spatial computing is transforming this paradigm by dissolving physical barriers and integrating information with the environment. Ambient computing takes this concept even further. The goal is to eliminate our dependence on screens and keyboards, allowing technology to seamlessly merge with everyday space in an almost imperceptible way. At the same time, artificial intelligence and visual, tactile or acoustic response systems are redefining how we interact with information.

In 2019, we opened the IDEAL Centre d’Arts Digitals in Barcelona, a pioneering space for what we call “immersive experiences”. This was the place where we wanted to bring to life all the theories surrounding the emergence of digital arts in new audiovisual narratives. Life is immersive by nature, but our form of immersivity was the first to have a digital layer that was inseparably attached. IDEAL gave us, the members of the Layers of Reality studio, the perfect space to quickly bring our ideas to life, sometimes in a somewhat rudimentary way, but always surprising and, above all, in constant contact with a very broad, less tech-savvy audience.

Antònia Folguera
Curator and communicator

The terms immersive, immersivity and immersion are used so often that they have almost lost their meaning. For the public, immersive is often synonymous with large-format projections, whether on a single surface or an entire room, likely because both the scale and the sense of confusion – of not knowing where to focus – can be quite overwhelming. We have been conditioned for thousands of years to engage with things head-on, and now we are entering an era where our senses demand the entire space around us.

True immersivity represents a paradigm shift in which we stop merely seeing and start living, where we stop thinking in squares (or rectangles, like a film frame or a phone screen) and begin to think in spheres. The smallest unit of meaning in immersivity is the world itself. This is the name we give to the digital bubble that holds the image, sound, and the necessary rules for interacting with this world.

Personally, I believe it’s crucial to reclaim the concept of spatial computing, as it is through this set of technologies that new languages are emerging, challenging everything we’ve learned from film, audiovisual media, video games and current virtual and augmented reality experiments.

Spatial computing integrates the physical and digital realms through technologies like virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence, allowing computers to understand, interact with and manipulate space in a way that mirrors human perception. These tools will (likely) forever change the way we interact with computers.

Mònica Bello
Curator and art historian

Immersivity is not a new concept; we’ve been exploring it for years. The current hype surrounding immersivity is more closely tied to the metaverse. It is in this realm that major tech companies are pushing for the total standardisation of the digital experience.

On the international cultural scene, there is considerable effort going into the development of immersive projects. Institutions like the British Council and cities such as Luxembourg and Venice are clear examples of this. However, such initiatives require a strong, sustained commitment. These are technologies that demand significant investment, maintained over time.

In Barcelona, there is still a lack of experience with immersive formats. As both an audience and users, we are not yet sufficiently familiar with these technologies. Proposals like teamLab at CaixaForum have been seen, but they remain isolated instances. For example, the Björk exhibition at the CCCB, while innovative, was still based on a traditional audiovisual format. Since then, much progress has been made, but a broader development framework should be established, one that integrates both the technological and cultural aspects.

I recently visited the Undershed gallery in Bristol, which is dedicated to showcasing the best immersive and interactive art from around the world. And I get the sense that we have not yet reached our goal. There’s still a long way to go. That space has a lot of content, but the technologies remain quite rudimentary.

Maria Bernat
Director of the Artistic Programme at Casa Batlló

What is an immersive artistic format? The modernists aimed to be at the cutting edge, creating a “total work of art” by combining architecture, painting, sculpture and music. Today, with new media and technological advances, the city has become a hub of excellence in this field, offering proposals that cater to the cultured and discerning tastes of the people of Barcelona. Spaces like the CCCB, Sónar+D, OFFF, Llum BCN and MIRA bring these kinds of proposals to the forefront. More recently, the Disseny Hub, MACBA and Espai 13 at the Fundació Joan Miró have brought world-class new media art projects or, “immersive artistic formats”, to Barcelona.

This creative dynamism also stems from a thriving audiovisual ecosystem. Initiatives like the new Interactive Arts & Science Laboratory (IASlab) at La Salle, a pioneering laboratory in Europe for digital arts and technology, remind me of the founding of the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB) in 1875, when the city was undergoing a major urban transformation and required a school of architecture capable of supporting that change.

Today, a century later, the same processes of renewal and adaptation are at play. The generational shift, as in every era, is finding its own voice and is developing within an ecosystem made up of research centres, production companies, artists, schools, institutions, fairs and festivals that drive their own “total work of art”.

Irma Vilà
Curator and researcher

The term immersive format is undergoing a kind of taxonomic eclipse, similar to what has happened in recent years with certain practices in digital creation, where the part is mistaken for the whole. The fascination generated by the sudden rise of exhibition spaces adopting 360° video projection as their technological leitmotif, along with technologies like virtual reality, may lead us to forget the deeply experimental – and equally fascinating – nature of immersive practices that do not rely on images. Pioneering artists like Iannis Xenakis, with his Polytopes in the 1970s, or works like Feed by Kurt Hentschlager, created spatial canvases that, without using a single pixel, generated profoundly transformative experiences by building an abstract, genuinely immersive language.

It is within this now overshadowed sense of immersive formats that we find practices closely tied to artistic research, far removed from design commissions or institutional and corporate promotion. Collectives like Cabosanroque with Colectivo Animal, as seen in the latest edition of Llum BCN, inherit and breathe new life into this practice with Trànsit, a work where a series of decontextualised traffic lights and a precise, enveloping sound design create an overwhelming immersive experience, without the need for the ubiquitous screens. Other artists, such as Playmodes, Antoni Arola and Cube.bz, have been embracing immersivity as the central element of their language for years, if not decades. Their work demonstrates that immersion can be more genuine the further it moves away from two-dimensional surfaces and occupies three-dimensional space with the help of light and sound.

Jorge Carrión
Writer and cultural critic

The Llum BCN festival demonstrates that the streets of Barcelona can be transformed into immersive spaces that combine cutting-edge contemporary art with large public audiences. My neighbourhood, Poblenou, is a topography where three markedly different projects coexist: the pioneering IDEAL Barcelona, the erotic House of Erika Lust (blending pornography for women with sensuality) and the sports-focused Alfa5 (by XR Sports), alongside several escape rooms. During Llum BCN, it was striking to see how conceptual and abstract works, both in public spaces and private interiors, attracted hundreds, if not thousands, of people interested in a type of art increasingly integrated into our cultural consumption landscape. The maturity of this audience invites risk.

Last summer, I visited the Arte Museum Las Vegas, part of a franchise with several branches in Asia, including one in Dubai, and observed the emergence of an international style of immersive experience. This approach shuns authorship and offers tourists a spectacle that is always similar, constrained to a large extent by what the technology is capable of delivering. New ideas, strategies and themes – or old ones – can bypass this global homogenisation. As Isaki Lacuesta’s poetic installation Tènue llum retroactiva (Faint Retroactive Light) reminded us, after all, we are updating the sense of wonder once found in the circus, world exhibitions, panoramas or hall of mirrors. Properly adapted to our era, analogue illusionism can be just as hypnotic as its digital counterpart.

Marisol López
Specialist in Digital Culture

When a book grabs our attention and we can’t put it down, we feel immersed in the story, inside the mind of the person sharing their thoughts and reflections with us. The same happens with a film: we are captivated by being part of what is unfolding. We don’t just want to be passive observers; we want to feel and be moved by the images, the knowledge and the stories. All of this says a lot about us: we don’t settle for simply watching from the outside. We want to feel, touch and be part of the experience. Immersive art makes us more active participants, taking us one step further by placing us inside a recreated world. And when it’s interactive, it lets us shape the story and create our own version.

As with other formats (from television to video games, literature and cinema), what really matters is the content, the creation. We are still in the early stages of these spaces and technologies. The near future will bring changes and innovations that will undoubtedly continue to surprise us. This is a world that will evolve, diversify and give us the chance to experience and enjoy ever more varied and unique experiences. It’s likely that, in the next technological leap, we won’t even be talking about glasses, screens or rooms anymore.

Science fiction is also known as anticipatory literature. These are stories that open a window, letting us glimpse the future possibilities of cultural and artistic creation and experience.

Vicente Matallana
Cultural Manager

What matters is not the medium, but the content. If digital technologies allow people to discover Sorolla or Van Gogh through immersive experiences, that is certainly better than ignorance. However, many immersive experiences are tied to a hollow, meaningless neo-pop trend – one that engulfs us without offering any critical thought. Art in the age of TikTok.

As with AI, its impact depends on how we humans use it, and that is not very promising. Immersive experiences, far from being neutral, shape our relationship with art. Do they encourage us to question reality, or do they simply pull us into a sensory spectacle?

The real issue arises when immersive experiences don’t complement but replace other forms of technological and digital art. In Barcelona, where spaces like IDEAL coexist with creative proposals centred on the intersection of art, science and technology in their interaction and social analysis, this coexistence enriches the cultural landscape. But elsewhere, we’ve seen how immersive experiences push technological and digital art aside, suffocating it and limiting access to more innovative, experimental and critical proposals. It’s simply a culture of spectacle.

If we allow the market to turn the artistic experience into an empty simulation, we risk art losing its ability to provoke questions and becoming nothing more than a reflection of the entertainment industry we are already immersed in. The key is balance. Immersion should be a tool, not a substitute for art. They must coexist and complement one another.