Stop Calling a Room Full of Projectors an “Immersive Experience”

I am begging the art world to retire the phrase “immersive experience.” It has been stretched so thin that it now covers everything from a genuinely transporting installation to standing in a dark room while Van Gogh’s sunflowers slowly crawl up a wall like they are trying to escape.

Here is my position: most projection-based art shows are not immersive. They are large. They are colorful. They contain a soundtrack that begins with piano and ends with a suspicious amount of thunder. But size is not immersion. If I can check my messages while a digital Monet dissolves behind me, I am not inside the painting. I am waiting for my friend to finish taking a photograph of herself inside the painting.

The problem is not technology. Digital art can be astonishing. A projection can make light behave like architecture. It can turn a room into a breathing organism, a memory, a storm, a nervous system. The best examples make you lose track of where the image ends and the room begins. They give you something to think about besides where the exit is.

But too many of these shows treat famous artists as a playlist of greatest hits. Here comes the blue period. There goes the starry night. Now watch the brushstrokes become butterflies, because apparently every emotional journey must eventually produce butterflies. The artist’s work becomes decorative wallpaper for a dramatic soundtrack, and the visitor is handed the role of “person having an experience.”

Meanwhile, an actual museum gallery can be immersive without moving a single image. Stand close to a painting and notice the paint piled up like frosting. Hear the floor creak. Watch someone across the room get unexpectedly ambushed by a portrait. Feel your attention slow down. That is immersion, too. It just doesn’t come with fog machines.

Still, I do not want these exhibitions banned or scolded out of existence. They are often people’s first invitation into visual art, and that matters. Someone who buys a ticket for a glowing Van Gogh room may later wander into a museum and discover that the real painting is smaller, stranger, and much more alive than the projection. The gateway drug is still a gateway.

So keep the projectors. Keep the giant rooms. Keep the thunder, if you must. Just call the thing what it is: a digital spectacle, a light installation, a moving-image exhibition. “Immersive” should be earned. If the artwork does not change the way I occupy the room, it is not immersive. It is simply very large wallpaper with excellent marketing.