Between Spectacle and Encounter: Some thoughts on immersive impact

Editor Amy Carleton explores how we receive immersive experiences in community.  She also helps tee up the second call for submissions for the Review.

Quilt Shanty, a project from artists Emily Quandahl and Madeline Cochran draws on the visual language of barn quilts and features colorful panels that visitors can switch out in the frame like a puzzle. (author photo.)

The most compelling immersive work I've encountered in the past year was on a frozen lake in Minneapolis, where Art Shanty Projects transformed the ice of Lake Harriet into a temporary village of artist-built structures, performances, and participatory encounters — programming that ranged from BIPOC yoga sessions to Indigenous lacrosse demonstrations to community singing circles, all built on a commitment to racial, gender, and economic justice that it is real and experiential. It was open to anyone willing to bundle up and show up (but boy, was it COLD!).

And in other cities (and climates!) there were experiences in which I was also fully immersed, even as their modalities and registers differed greatly.

In NYC, Kinfolk Tech used augmented reality to place digital monuments of Black and Brown historical figures into public spaces where no physical monument had been approved, turning sidewalks into sites of collective memory and historical equity.

In Atlanta, Charlotte, and New York, Jabari Graham's Art, Beats + Lyrics, which is now in its twenty-first year, has continued doing what it has always done: gathering people around visual art being made in real time and while hip-hop plays–itself a genre that emphasizes collaboration, innovation, and community–in warehouse spaces where the distinction between audience and participant dissolves before the first DJ set ends.

And though it struck a different tone, I was so transfixed by the heavy history transferred through Issac Julien’s brilliant Lessons of The Hour: Frederick Douglass installation that I saw it twice–at NYC’s MoMa and again last month in DC at the Smithsonian.

The antechamber of Sir Issac Julien’s Lessons of The Hour: Frederick Douglas (2019) at MoMa, which featured archival materials offering biographical context of Douglass’ life and career.

Sir Issac Julien’s Lessons of The Hour: Frederick Douglas (2019) features moving images with period reenactments of activist, writer, orator, and philosopher Frederick Douglass in 4K color and surround sound.

Finally, last summer in Brooklyn, I found myself at a Soul in the Horn event with the venerable Natasha Diggs on the decks, live musicians cycling through, projections washing the walls of a warehouse where a crowd that spanned generations and neighborhoods moved together for hours in a space that felt less like a show than a shared heartbeat. I felt, in the words of the late Maya Angelou, like I could “crawl into the space between the notes.”

Soul In The Horn (SITH), Brooklyn, August 2025. SITH began as a community dance party in NYC from curator DProsper and resident DJ Natasha Diggs and has evolved into a global movement with the core mission “to lift the collective vibration.”

None of these projects would be called "immersive" by the industry's usual standards. There are no spatial computing platforms, no six-figure projection rigs. And yet each one does something that the most technically sophisticated XR experiences often struggle to achieve: they change who is in the room, and they change what those people do once they're there.

But yet I thought about this again in January, standing inside Arte Museum at Chelsea Piers, which is a visually stunning digital exhibition that includes among its installations, a reinterpretation of the Musée d'Orsay's collection rendered as floor-to-ceiling projection. It was gorgeous. It was also, for me, most powerful as a mnemonic—a sensory echo of standing in front of the actual paintings in Paris, not a replacement for that encounter but a reminder of it. The technology was impressive and the experience was a memory of an experience. Holland Cotter has spent decades arguing, in his criticism for the New York Times, that the encounter with original work (its materiality, its context, its stubborn specificity) is not something that reproduction can replicate, only gesture toward. He's right. But the more interesting question for this publication isn't whether digital immersion can replace the Musée d'Orsay. It can't. The question is what immersive experiences can do that the Musée d'Orsay cannot, and for whom.

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The Arte Museum, an immersive experience located in Chelsea Piers offering a reinterpretation of Paris’ Musee d’Orsay collection after a three-year collaboration between the two entities.

That question followed me to Austin in March, where we held the launch event for the Immersive Impact Review during SXSW, hosted by UT Austin's Texas Immersive Institute. The event featured an immersive showcase and a series of speakers whose work embodies the range of what this publication aims to cover.

Kinfolk Tech's Idris Brewster spoke about building an augmented reality archive that centers Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Queer histories, which is work that doesn't wait for institutional permission to place monuments in public space.

Idris Brewster speaks of the motivation behind Kinfolk Tech’s work at the Immersive Impact Review launch event at UT Austin (Author photo).

Mical Hutson, who contributed a piece to our first issue about the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra's immersive experiments, talked about what it looks like when a legacy arts institution tries to meet its community outside the concert hall. She was followed by Aram Kim Bryan, the CSO's VP of Community Relations and Learning, who described how the orchestra is continuing that work through initiatives like the CSO Roadshow — bringing live performance directly into Charlotte's neighborhoods. The through line across these conversations was a shared refusal to treat "immersive" as a technology category and an insistence on treating it as a design question: immersive for whom, on whose terms, and to what end?

Mical Hutson (top) and Aram Kim Bryan (lower) speak about the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra’s development of XR programming to cultivate new audiences (Author photo).

SXSW itself offered a week-long case study in the breadth of answers the field is currently giving to that question and in the tensions between them. MIT Open Documentary Lab’s's Layers of Place: Austin transformed Austin's public spaces into sites of counter-narrative and collective memory. One of its six projects, The Founders Pillars, used AR to reimagine the neoclassical pillars of the Texas State Capitol as a memorial for African Americans, confronting histories of slavery, coerced labor, and power through decolonial futurist storytelling. It was site-responsive work that understood place as something layered and contested rather than fixed — the kind of project that makes the case for AR not as novelty but as reparative infrastructure.

Elsewhere, the immersive spectrum stretched wide. IBM's AI Sports Club, built around its collaboration with Scuderia Ferrari, invited attendees to step into the world of Formula 1 through AI-generated race commentary, simulator experiences, and personalized data–slick, expensive, corporate, and, I'll admit, genuinely fun.

Gabo Arora's The Great Dictator, a participatory AI installation in the XR Experience Competition, used generative AI not to deceive but to historicize, placing participants inside archival footage of defining speeches through their own voice and likeness. Named for Chaplin's 1940 film, the piece flipped the script on what deepfakes have come to represent, showing that the same synthetic media tools currently weaponized for misinformation can, when wielded with intention, become instruments of civic memory and critical engagement.

Outside the SXSW XR Experience ballroom before entering The Great Dictator participatory installation (Author photo).

And then there was my personal favorite of the week: Jonathan Yeo's Spectacular: The Art of Jonathan Yeo in Augmented Reality, a collaboration with Snap that used fifth-generation Spectacles to transform Yeo's portraits (including his now-famous painting of King Charles III) into living, responsive AR installations. What struck me about the piece was how it inverted the Arte Museum dynamic I'd been mulling since January: rather than using technology to reproduce existing masterworks as spectacle, Yeo used AR to extend his own paintings into a new register of encounter–one that responded to each viewer in real time, making the act of looking genuinely reciprocal.

Artist Jonathan Yeo in front of his 2012 Self Portrait, reframed as part of the Spectacular exhibit at SXSW (Author photo).

When I spoke with Yeo at SXSW, what came through most clearly was his conviction that AR's real advantage over VR is fundamentally social. "You are seeing other people," he said. "You're in the real space. It's a social thing. It's not locked in your own VR... it's a shared experience." He described a phenomenon that visitors at the Centre Pompidou installation of this same project had experienced: even though you know the AR overlay is not real, part of your brain insists that it must be, because it's anchored to the physical world in front of you. "Your brain's fighting over this instinct," he told me. "You know it's impossible, but your brain's telling you it must be possible." That perceptual tension and the shimmer between the actual and the augmented is something no screen-based reproduction can produce.

What I found most persuasive, though, was Yeo's thinking about restraint. As someone who sits on the board of the UK's National Portrait Gallery, he's watched institutions wrestle with how much technology to let through the door. His conclusion: the technology works best when it's optional, when it enhances rather than overwhelms, and when it does things that paint alone cannot.

"Technology's great when it brings something new, these other dimensions," he said. "Rather than just... I think museums don't always get it right."

The nice irony? At the end of the most cutting-edge AR exhibition I saw all week, every visitor walked away with an analog print–a selfie of sorts, rendered as a Yeo-style portrait. This takeaway was a physical, tangible artifact of their encounter. And that, Yeo admitted with a laugh, was what people were most delighted by.

This author’s analog selfie in the Yeo portrait style, my takeaway from Spectacular (Author photo).

These experiences sit on a continuum. At one end, technology serves as spectacle:  impressive, often beautiful, but fundamentally about display. At the other, it serves as an encounter: creating conditions for people to see, feel, or understand something they couldn't have accessed otherwise. The most interesting work at SXSW this year lived on the encounter end of that continuum, and it was almost always work that began with a question about community rather than a question about platform.

This is the tension at the center of the Immersive Impact Review. For more than a decade, immersive media has been promoted as a uniquely powerful tool for empathy, education, and social transformation. The claims are familiar: VR can make you feel what someone else feels. AR can reveal what's hidden in plain sight. Spatial storytelling can move audiences from passive consumption to active engagement. Some of these claims have evidence behind them. Many do not. And the gap between the promise and the proof has consequences for funders deciding where to invest, for communities being asked to participate, and for practitioners trying to do serious work in a field that sometimes can't distinguish between impact and spectacle.

At MIT, where I'm based, the Open Documentary Lab has spent years incubating XR projects like Rashin Fahandej's A Father's Lullaby, which uses immersive installation to confront the impact of mass incarceration on families; and Assia Boundaoui's Inverse Surveillance, which deploys AR to challenge who watches whom in American cities. The social good case for immersive technology may ultimately rest less on its capacity to generate empathy in a headset and more on its utility as a tool for equity, understanding, and informed decision-making in fields where the stakes are concrete and measurable. In short, the immersive field is wider and stranger and more structurally interesting than the conference circuit tends to suggest.

In our first issue, we followed that range. Each story highlights progress: audiences moving through unfamiliar spaces, institutions moving beyond inherited formats, technologies moving from novelty toward utility. But we're not interested in innovation for its own sake. We want to know what else changes when the status quo evolves.

Last week we launched our call for submissions for Issue Two: "Who Is This For? The Access Illusion of XR." If the inaugural issue asks what immersive impact looks like in practice, the second pushes further into the question that surfaced again and again–at the Texas Immersive Institute, in the XR exhibition halls, in conversations over tacos on Congress Avenue: who actually benefits from these tools, and who is being left out?

We are interested in the distance between XR's democratic promise and the material realities of who can create, distribute, and experience immersive work–across health, education, cultural preservation, workforce development, and civic life. We want case studies and provocations, research and practitioner reflections, creative responses and honest post-mortems.

The question this publication keeps returning to is deceptively simple: who is this for? It's worth asking of every headset, every installation, every grant application, every editorial decision…including our own. We don't claim to have answered it. But we intend to keep asking.

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Amy Carleton

Amy Carleton, Ph.D. is editor of IXA's Immersive Impact Review. At MIT, she teaches courses at the intersection of media, technology, and culture. Her academic research is focused on the behavioral economics of knowledge sharing platforms (like Wikipedia!) and inclusive technology.

Amy is an educator, scholar, and creative practitioner whose work spans media, music, and public culture. A recognized Wiki Black History Scholar, she designed and led the Community of Soul project, a Wikimedia Foundation-supported initiative writing Black music history into Wikipedia. She is the co-founder of Black Notes Project, a Charlotte-based arts festival and nonprofit celebrating Black American music. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, and the LA Review of Books, among other publications.