Being inside the image: heightening the sense of presence in a video captured environment through artistic means

Abstract

This paper explores the use of omni-directional video, a high- impact immersive medium, by a performance group and multi-disciplinary team of artists and scientists. CREW develops artistic strategies from and for this technology that lead to unprecedented levels of presence and intimacy as well as novel ways of mixing and experiencing different levels of reality. We argue that sensorial deprivation is a key element in creating a sense of presence in a video-captured world and use synaesthetic negociation as a concept to describe our tendency to unify the different sensorial stimuli to a coherent and meaningful experience. In reconfiguring the overall sensory, mixing physical stimuli with live and prerecorded stimuli, different levels of reality seem to blur, opening up the embodied experience of a transitional environment. Although these findings were not derived from a scientific research set-up in the traditional sense, we argue that the artistic practice as performed in close collaboration with scientists offer particular insights to the research on presence.