Immersive art has been one of biggest trends in the artworld for the past few years. Yet, so far there has been little philosophical discussion on the nature and value of this immersive trend. In this article, I show how Heidegger’s meditations on art can provide a robust assessment of immersive art. On the one hand, immersive art can be taken to culminate in Heidegger’s views on the “machinational” character of modern art, where artworks turn into calculative experience machines, geared to provide “lived experiences” rather than experi­ences of truth. On the other hand, Heidegger’s thought also lends itself to a more positive assessment, where immersive art undermines machination from within and provides experiences of wonder, which are irreducible to and uncontrollable by calculative thinking.

Intense aesthetic experiences are often described in terms of self-forgetfulness, where the perceiver becomes immersed in the aesthetic phenomenon to the extent of losing consciousness of being the subject of the experience. Although such experiences have been described from the early eighteenth century onwards, there is still a surprising lack of detailed investigation on the precise nature of aesthetic self-forgetfulness. What happens in this experience, and precisely what is the ‘self’ that is forgotten? Building on phenomenological theories of self-consciousness, I argue that aesthetic self-forgetfulness cannot be understood as an absolute eradication of the self, as a pre-reflective self-consciousness stays intact even in deeply immersive aesthetic experiences. Thus, I argue that talk of self-forgetfulness is to some extent misleading, and the changes in the subject’s self-relation during aesthetic experience is better understood in terms of an altered sense of agency.

No abstract

Contemporary phenomenological discussions on relationship between painting and nothingness have mainly employed Sartrean and Heideggerian notions of nothingness. In this article, I propose another perspective by discussing the possibility of pictorially depicting Levinas's notion of the nothingness of being, which he develops in his early works in terms of the il y a ("there is").For Levinas, the il y a intimates itself in moments like insomnia, where the world as a horizon of possibilities slips away and all there is left is an experience of present absence, an enchainment to the night, which renders the insomniac utterly impotent and exposed. The possibility of eliciting an experience of the il y a through artistic means has been extensively discussed in literary theory, but so far there has been hardly any discussion regarding the pictorial depiction the il y a. In this article, I suggest that the atmospheric interior paintings of the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi exemplify par excellence a painterly rendering of the experience of Levinasian nothingness. Through an analysis of Hammershøi's compositional techniques, I show how figurative means can bring about an anonymous, non-figurative presence which eludes reification.