immersive call #1: public immersion

Inter Arts Center (IAC) is happy to announce its first Immersive Call in collaboration with KØS – Museum of Art in Public Spaces in Denmark. This specific call is part of a broader collaboration between IAC and KØS on a three year research and exhibition project called Sites, sounds and screens – new approaches to sites, locality and technology in public art.

For IAC this new open call is part of a greater focus on immersive formats. Alongside the annual call for immersive projects a network and a gathering called Immersive Days has also been established, with its first edition June 2021. In November next year professional artists, curators, researchers, technicians, teachers and students within a broader field of immersive technologies and artistic practices meet up to share their latest work and challenges, and to exchange ideas and give each other feedback.

The first Immersive Call aims to investigate, what could be read as a contradiction, public immersion. When we talk about immersion, we tend to imagine an auditive or visual immersion into a world that excludes our surroundings, which is exactly what the public is all about – other people, and the spaces or sites that surrounds and connect us.

We encourage artists whose practice evolve around public space, extended reality, world building and/or immersive technologies to apply for this open call with new bold projects or adaptions of existing works. We are interested in the inherent contradiction of the term public immersion, and in addition to this in the overall question that Sites, sounds and screens raises about immersive technologies:

How do these technologies change the way we conceive, experience and engage with sites and locations? As artists and audience? Can we reconfigure or negotiate the dominating site-specific approaches through new technologies?