Immanence and Immersion

Immersion is the new orthodoxy. Within the production, curation and critique of sound art, as well as within the broader fields of sound studies and auditory culture, the immersive is routinely celebrated as an experiential quality of sound, the value of which is inherent yet strengthened through dubious metaphysical oppositions to the visual. Yet even within the visual arts an acoustic condition grounded in Marshall McLuhan's metaphorical notion of acoustic space underwrites predispositions towards immersion. This broad conception of an acoustic condition in contemporary art identifies the envelopment of audiences and spectators who no longer perceive from a distance but immanently experience immersive artworks and environments. Immanence and Immersion takes a critical approach to the figures of immersion and interiority describing an acoustic condition in contemporary art. It is argued that a price paid for this predisposition towards immersion is often the conceptual potency and efficacy of the work undertaken, resulting in arguments that compound the marginalisation and disempowerment of practices and discourses concerned with the sonic. The variously phenomenological, correlational and mystical positions that support the predominance of the immersive are subject to critique before suggesting that a stronger distinction between the often confused concepts of immersion and the immanence might serve as a means of breaking with the figure of immersion and the circle of interiority towards attaining greater conceptual potency and epistemological efficacy within the sonic arts.

Will Schrimshaw is an artist, musician and Lecturer in Music and Sound at Edge Hill University, UK. He has published a number of articles relating to sound in the arts and exhibits his work internationally.

List of Figures List of Tables Preface Acknowledgements 0. Introduction 0.1. Immersion is the New Orthodoxy 0.2. The Ideology of Immersion 0.3. Immersion and Correlationism 0.4. Immanence and Immersion 0.5. Exteriority and the Outside 0.6. Exiting Immersion 1. Decentralisation 1.1. Get Out of the Defensive Position 1.2. Transcendental Empiricism: Approaching the Edge of the Circle 1.3. Negative Duration 1.4. Prodigious Simplification 2. Infraesthetics 2.1. Extreme Audition 2.2. Rolf Julius 2.3. Stephen Vitiello 2.4. Nina Canell 3. Writing Out Sound 3.1. Writing and Exteriority 3.2. Exteriority and the Real 3.3. Sound Recording and Writing Sound 3.4. Sound is Always-Already Written Out 4. Immersive Phenomenology 4.1. Husserl 4.1.1 Intentionality and Direct Realism 4.1.2 Realism and Reduction 4.2. Merleau-Ponty 4.2.1 Immersive Phenomenology 4.2.2 Return to the Depth of the Pre-Objective 5. Sonic Materialism 5.1. Affective Matter 5.2. Material Phenomenology 5.3. Sonic-Material Phenomenology 5.4. Sonic Realism 6. The Scientific Image 6.1. Ryoichi Kurokawa: Abstraction and the Lifeworld 6.2. Towards a Corruption of Aesthetic Sufficiency 7. Repurposing Conceptualism 7.1. Immanence and Representation 7.2. Extinction Abounds: Katie Paterson 8. The Stratification of Immanence 8.1. Immanence Contra Immersion 8.2. Beyond the Circle 8.3. Immanence and an Ethics of Exteriority References