Entering an artistically created image as a virtual crossing of the border between art and life has been a vision of art production and a topos of art viewing since the emergence of art. The Chinese legend of the painter Wu Daozi, who disappeared before the emperor’s eyes in the large landscape mural he had painted himself, articulates the imaginary desire for a dissolution of the boundary between image, viewer and lived perceptual experience in what is probably the most direct and fantastic way.[1] In his book Traces, Ernst Bloch interpreted  this particular legend as the appearance of a utopia in the here-and-now.[2]

Immersive art exhibitions, which mushroomed in present-day digital modernity since the market success of the Imagine Van Gogh exhibition in 2008, form a new phenomenon in art-exhibition culture. They reflect the ongoing resituating of art history in the era of the digital image.[3] Through digital screening technology, they enable direct, multi-sensory “entry” into individual works of art and narrative art worlds. The immersive audiovisual environment of these art projections ensures that the exhibition viewer/visitor is standing in the middle of the image and can walk through its passage, physically enveloped by the compositional animations of the image flow during this wandering. It is the ubiquity of digitally circulating images in whose environment art history is repositioning and exhibiting itself as a flow of reproductions of canonized images.

Immersive digital exhibitions (IDE), as Nikita Mathias has defined the new type of blockbuster art exhibitions that live from “meta-artistic immersion,”[4] create an intense perceptual experience and receptive attitude in physical exhibition sites. They draw upon a strong bodily and multisensory experience of image space, involving the permeation of pictorial and spatial boundaries that even include the architecture of the built exhibition space. The relationship between the viewer and the art world is controlled by a digital egotism[5] of perception, a response to the growing datafication of the self.

The newly created permanent exhibition venues for the immersive, multi-sensory reception of digital (art) image circuits revolve around the themes of framelessness and borderlessness. “Frameless” is the brand name of the largest permanent art space for immersive digital art exhibitions (IDAE)[6] in the United Kingdom to date. It was founded in Marble Arch, London, in 2022 to promote “the area’s reputation as a destination for tourism, hospitality and leisure.”[7] In a total of four distinctive immersive gallery spaces, choreographed animations of masterpieces by famous artists such as Giovanni Antonio Canal (Canaletto), Paul Cézanne, Salvador Dali, Wassily Kandinsky, Gustav Klimt, Claude Monet, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Vincent van Gogh are presented. By animating visitors to “step inside art,”[8] the art venue redefines framelessness as an experiential immersive breaking-free of art.

The transcendence of boundaries is also the main goal of “teamLab Borderless,” a “museum without a map”[9] created by the international art collective teamLab.[10] The first permanent teamLab museum for immersive digital art exhibitions was founded under the name “MORI Building Digital Art Museum” in February 2024 in Tokyo, and a new Digital Art Museum by teamLab Borderless is planned for Hamburg.[11] In addition, further grand IDAEs in Abu Dhabi, Kyoto, Sapporo and Utrecht will be established in the near future.[12]

Visitors are immersed in the Light Sculpture at teamLab Borderless, Azabudai Hills, Minato City, Tokyo, Japan (2024). Photograph by Danny With Love.

As the designation suggests, teamLab Borderless enables visitors to immerse their bodies into “borderless art.” Groups of artworks are animated in such a way that one continuous art world without borders is formed. The artworks themselves as well as the spaces into which they are projected become permeable membranes open for connecting with the wandering visitors. “Artworks move out of the rooms freely, form connections and relationships with people, communicate with other works, influence and sometimes intermingle with each other, and have the same concept of time as the human body.”[13]

The Ateliers des Lumières and their international branches,[14] founded in 2018 in Paris, are similar venues for staging immersive art experiences. Distinct from the teamLab Borderless “museums” who present and market self-created artworks defined predominantly by the visual language of digital abstraction, but in correspondence with the concept of London-based “Frameless,” the French Ateliers des Lumières are specialized in showing popular works by master artists of modernity, as proven by the first highly successful IDAE on Gustav Klimt in Paris.

These three representative examples of internationally expanding digital art venues, even partly defined as digital art museums, demonstrate that a completely new investment market for digital immersive exhibitions has emerged over the last decade, resulting in a new type of digital art viewing and multi-sensory engagement whose comprehensive institutional and art-market analysis has yet to be carried out. Since a comprehensive picture of this fluctuating development cannot be provided in this article, I will limit my elaboration by highlighting some crucial aspects and features of immersive art exhibitions in the Ateliers des Lumières while focusing on the role of para-sites for digital immersive art reception.

Frameless Viewing through the Image Totale[15]. Picturing History of the Ateliers des Lumières
The freeing of the image from its frame, as implemented in the digital immersive art exhibitions of the Ateliers des Lumières, goes back to the(currently copyrighted)invention of the Image Totale by French journalist, photographer and filmmaker Albert Plécy in 1977. Plécy can be considered an image theorist, although he remained largely undiscovered in visual studies research. During his lifetime, he was called an “homme d’image.”[16] He was chief editor of the French magazine Point de vue—Image du monde and founder of the Association des Gens d’images. A contemporary of Roland Barthes and of other image semiologists interested in photography and film,[17] he sought to establish a universally comprehensible grammar of images. His Grammaire élémentaire de l’image, which was published in Paris in 1968,[18] is based on the thesis that every photographic image is fundamentally a composite image; it can be broken down into the smallest discrete units and, on the basis of this analytical decomposition, its generation of meaning and visual message can be made legible. Plécy’s concept of Image Totale was an attempt to break out of the frame as both defining marker and imprisoning enclosure of the image and enable viewers to look at an open, borderless world of visual representation. On the cover image of his Grammaire élémentaire de l’image (edition of 1968), a photo composition by Gérard Blanchet modelled after a photo montage by Plécy himself, the total absorption of the human viewer by the image already manifests. A tiny human figure can be seen in the owl’s eye,[19] signaling the consummate entrance into the picture. In Plécy’s view, humans perceive reality as an immersive and ever-expanding image environment, and, conversely, this all-encompassing experience is identified with the experience of image worlds as virtual reality: “The real world, which is everywhere, with the sky, the ground, its play of light and shadow, is Image Totale^©.”[20]

Cathedral of Images in Les-Beaux-de-Provence, France, northern hall, 2011. Photograph by © Hans Plantinga

In the abandoned white limestone quarries of the Val d’enfer at the foot of the village of Les Baux-de-Provence in France, Plécy found the suitable spatial environment to test his concept of Image Totale. The quarries had already been spotted before as a cineastic site by French filmmaker Jean Cocteau whose final episodes of his film Le Testament d’Orphée (1959) were shot therein. With the first immersive “cave” spectacle staged by Plécy in 1977 on the gigantic limestone screens of 4000m², the quarries of Les-Baux-de-Provence were renamed into “Cathedral of Images” thereby establishing a direct connection between the scenographic exhibitionary concept of Image Totale with the design of the gothic cathedral as a total work of art.[21] Plécy claims that the Cathedral of Images, which works with immersive, audiovisual projection images, is able to create the impression of a synthesis of the arts in just 100 seconds that would have taken the builders of cathedrals centuries to achieve.[22] He therefore locates the future of the Gesamtkunstwerk in the age of audiovisual media in the immersive image cathedral. In this respect, it is entirely in keeping with the spirit of Plécy, the inventor of the Image Totale, when music from Richard Wagner’s operas is heard in the IDAE of Klimt’s masterpieces at the Ateliers des Lumières, such as in Paris in 2018 or at the Phoenix des Lumières in Dortmund in 2023.

Exhibition view of Gustav Klimt, Gold und Farbe, 2024, Phoenix des Lumières, Dortmund, Germany © Culturespaces / Vincent Pinson, https://www.phoenix-lumieres.com/de/gustav-klimt 

Founded in 1977, the Cathedral of Images presented an “advanced production of luminous frescoes of automatically changing imagery on the white stone walls from dozens of carousel projectors, with accompanying soundtrack, that enveloped the contours of the walls and the ceiling of the quarry, producing a 3-dimensional vision, and the viewers themselves, being illuminated and integrated into the vividly coloured imagery.”[23] The synthesis of the arts targeted by the concept of the total image is expressed in the connection between the visual arts and the surrounding architecture of the quarry, the relief of the wall and the linkage between the dynamically animated visual stills and sound images, which in turn evoke mental images. The Image Totale, which encompasses the viewer from all sides of the room, is intended to enable a multimedia, synaesthetic visual experience: “The total image is the sound image, the olfactory or tactile image, it is the appeal to mental images.”[24] To achieve this totally absorbing image environment, a technique of topoprojection was developed with the aid of photogrammetry permitting to adapt the projected image to the three-dimensional structure of the built exhibition space and the textural relief of its walls.[25]

The topics for this exhibition spectacle in the Cathedral of Images were diverse; interdisciplinary in terms of media, and designed for universal communication, ranging from art, architecture and film history to global cultural heritage, nature and the cosmos.[26] This broad approach is continued in the IDEs of the Ateliers des Lumières and teamLab Borderless, as explained above. A decisive feature of the Image Totale shows was that, in addition to image technicians, music directors were also employed to create an all-inclusive synaesthetic experience. Over the decades, the use of image media and visualization technologies has been renewed, so that a historical development can be seen from the audiovisual systems of slide projection to multimedia systems[27] and computer-controlled image programming. In the realization of Michel-ange a la Sixtine (1992-1994), the computer was used for the first time, not only to program the sequence of images in the Cathedral of Images, but also to rework individual images where it seemed necessary. Ethical questions as to whether this was permissible were not (yet) considered, as enthusiasm for the new possibilities of creation and transformation offered by digital image technologies dominated.[28]

The 2008 exhibition Imagine Van Gogh brought the Cathedral of Images into the digital age; it can be considered the first digital immersive art exhibition in the sense of the aforementioned characteristics of IDEs. Curated by Annabelle Mauger in collaboration with Julien Baron, the immersive digital art exhibition was a huge success. In 2016, the two founded the company lililillilil with the express purpose of designing and producing immersive digital exhibitions based on the concept of the Image Totale in the legacy of Plécy. They even registered the concept of the Image Totale as a trademark and added their signature approach to its exhibition concept: “telling a story by releasing the emotion contained in the works, presented in their authenticity.”[29] In 2017, they presented an improved version of the original Imagine Van Gogh exhibition (2008) in the Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris. Due to its great success, it toured internationally and reached an audience of millions. Since the format was quickly copied by countless imitators, Mauger and Baron repeatedly emphasized that they had created the “original” immersive art exhibition of Van Gogh based on the protected concept of the Image Totale. The website of Imagine Van Gogh. The Original Immersive Exhibition in Image Totale©[30] restrains from showing videos while arguing that the framing of the image contradicts the concept of the Image Totale as instigated by its inventor Plécy. This is, after all, consistent with the idea of the frameless image and makes it clear that the “authentic” immersive experience of Image Totale is only possible on site, in the new cathedrals of digital imagery. Over 30 IDAEs on modern artists designed by the lililillilil company have toured the world up to now, fulfilling the criterion of transnationally migrating art exhibitions. The most recent development is the design of immersive city exhibitions as virtual visitor promenades through metropolitan spaces of art, architecture and history, such as the newly licensed Imagine Paris.[31]

Exhibition Screening in Heritage Para-Sites
Recognizing the enormous commercial potential of immersive exhibitions in the era of the digital image, the French heritage organization Culturespaces, a leading actor in the digital revolution of museums and their exhibition practice, took over the management of the Cathedral of Images in Les-Baux-de-Provence in 2012. The original system of carousel slide projectors was permanently replaced by digital projectors, the newly introduced AMIEX® technology (Art & Music Immersive Experience)[32] was used to perfect the audiovisual experience of total immersion, and new “cultural spaces” for the staging of immersive digital exhibitions were scouted. Culturespaces is a private French company and foundation that takes care of French cultural heritage, including the art sector. Its services cover the direct or partnered global management and development of existing public and private monuments, museums and art centers, but also the creation and organization of new cultural establishments and exhibition formats, such as multidisciplinary and digital art centers. Founded in 1990 by Bruno Monnier, it has become the fifth most important actor for the promotion of national art, culture, and tourist heritage in France following the Louvre Museum, the Center for National Monuments, the Domaine de Versailles and the Eiffel Tour. “Sharing culture with all audiences”[33] is the credo of the heritage organization, emphasizing social inclusion and barrier-free exhibition design. In 2018, Culturespaces opened the first so-called digital art center, the Atelier des Lumières, in a former 19^th century foundry in Paris. Since then, the worldwide expansion of the concept of digital art centers continued up to the present.[34]

Bassins des Lumières in Bordeaux, France, with memorial in honour of the Spanish Republican prisoners who helped build the submarine base, 2021, Wikipedia Commons 

The venues selected by Culturespaces for the establishment of new digital art centers around the world are abandoned or non-used facilities with potential heritage status, such as monuments of industrial, theatre, and military culture, but also contemporary commercial buildings such as shopping malls. Referencing the French Lumières brothers as industrial pioneers of photo- and cinematography, Lumières’ digital art centers all keep the historical meaning and function of their respective heritage site in the official designation.[35] The former Cathedral of Images in the quarry of Les-Baux-de-Provence was renamed into Carrières de Lumières (2018); the digital art center Bunker des Lumières (2018) on Cheju Island, South Korea, is located in the command center of a former bunker. Two IDE centers are located in waterfront areas: the Bassins des Lumières (2020), the largest digital art center of the world to date, is positioned in the old submarine base of Bordeaux, and Port de Lumières (2024) in the HafenCity of Hamburg. Fabrique des Lumières (2022) is situated in the refurbished site of the Westergasfabriek[36] in Amsterdam (2022), the Théâtre de Lumières in a former cabaret in Seoul, and the Hall des Lumières in the ancient Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in New York, Manhattan. With regard to this site-specificity in the naming, the Infinity des Lumières (2021) in the Dubai Shopping Mall in the UAE marks an exception from the rule, combining the name of the local partner (Infinity Arts) with the idea of infinite possibilities in digital art creation.

Through the redesign processes, cultural heritage, with its diverse histories, memories, and functionalities, is revitalized. This applies to both the history of the selected cultural sites and the history of the arts as presented in the IDEs on-site. From the heritage-entrepreneurial point of view, this is a clear win-win situation. The desolate or abandoned historical monuments/buildings can be conserved, modernized and managed in their main (infra-)structure, and at the same time, they can be transformed into cash cows for the commercial tourist heritage industry on a global scale. The digital art centers of Lumières’ legacy can be defined as para-sites in that they live at the expense of the historical monument site that they occupy and by whose physical substance and reimagined memory they are nurtured.[37] Moreover, they amount to para-sites by surpassing the physical host site, i.e. cross-fading it from within immersive virtual art projections of a digital image future. The exhibition space becomes itself a paraverse, it forms a gateway (also in the literal sense of a visitor’s passage) between the physical and the digital world of cultural and sensory experience. By means of dematerialization, objectlessness, and deframing, historical art transcends its original material and cultural historicity and reaches out into the digital-immersive image encounter of the here-and-now.

Digital Image Cathedrals? Exhibitionary and cultural significance of the Lumières digital art centers
Is the evolution of digital art centers, such as the permanent formation and global installation of the Lumières centers, revolutionizing how art is conceived and perceived, curated and displayed? The developmental, image-theoretical analysis of immersive digital art exhibitions in the legacy of Plécy’s Cathedral of Images has demonstrated that IDEs have evolved as a new tech-centric, specialized exhibition genre[38] propelled by and coopting the industries of digital image creation, design, and consumption. They are driven by the impulse to transcend traditionally established exhibition formats with hierarchical, stationary viewing practices and aim at including the viewer as a moving traveler and moved participant into the audio-visual surround totality of immersive image environments.

Are IDAEs an abusive, even parasitic exhibitionary form?  Do they misuse and exploit the high valorization of modern art histories and in particular the original singularity of popular star artists for profit-oriented copycat exhibition-making? Or do they represent an innovative, future-oriented exhibition form ideally suited for the legacy of art history to survive and wield power in times of digital image and net culture where reproduction circuits, memefication, and AI-based art creation increasingly question the original (object) status of art images?

The emergence of IDAEs was discussed controversially and met with strong criticism. Art writer Isabella de Souza voiced her fear that the digital nature of the immersive art exhibition “may dilute the authenticity and intrinsic value of traditional art forms.”[39] The main accusation was that the high art of modern masterpieces moved down to the lowlands of popular media and exhibition formats. Artnet critic Kate Brown entitled her article about the Ateliers des Lumières and their inaugural exhibition on Klimt (2018): “Is This the Future—or the End—of Art? A Selfie-Centric Art Space Opens in Paris With a Show of Klimt Projections.”[40] In that same line of argument, IDAEs were criticized as Instagram-friendly art exhibitions, following the trend of Instagram museums. Other critics observed a Disneyfication of art exhibitions and condemned their commercial financial drive.[41]

Contrary to this criticism and skepticism, the founder and president of Culturespaces, Bruno Monnier, believes in the future and educational potential of IDAEs: “People do not learn about culture as they did in the past. The passive observation of works of art is no longer relevant, and I’m convinced that people are increasingly learning about art through this immersive experience and the emotions they generate. The marriage of art and digital technology is, in my opinion, the future of the dissemination of art among future generations, as it is able to reach a younger and wider audience than that of the traditional museums.”[42] This statement emphasizes that the Lumières digital art centers seek to distance themselves from conventional visitor and reception behavior, in particular contemplative image viewing and bourgeois-intellectualist mediation via exhibition texts in the classic museum, and are looking for new emotive ways of communicating art and culture to a digital-native audience.[43] The aim is a multisensory, immersive art experience in which the perception of time and space coalesce into a strong sensual presence of the hic et nunc. However, the extent to which the passive viewer becomes an active participant, as the Lumières IDAEs strive for or suggest, is not necessarily obvious, especially when one considers the long history of participatory and interactive (media) art as a temporal and argumentative horizon. Against this backdrop, the viewer in the IDAEs, as conceived in the tradition of the Image Totale, seems like a passivized viewer who surrenders to the visual violence and exuberant spectacle of the (art) images, their superior power flowing into him from all sides. In short, it is a viewer teeming with perceptual and bodily overwhelmed by the Big Picture Show. Of course, this mode of reception can also be read the other way around as emotional activation through artistic visual power. However, it may only partially encourage visitors to think and engage in critical debate. Yet, it stands to reason to speak of active participation insofar as visitors do not stand passively and head-on in front of still or moving images on the wall or in the room, but actively walk through the animated, overlapping art images by moving through the image environment in the physical space. An additional activating effect of the IDAEs is that visitors position themselves within the gigantic digital image machinery and pose with it for selfies, in order to spread their being-in-the-picture via social media. Through this image-activation mode, visitors to the IDAEs become themselves advertising bodies; they perform as both digital egotists and image-branding actors.

Regarding the paraverse of digital art centers in general, parallels can be drawn to the receptive behavior and prosumer configuration in the digital platform economy and society where shared experiences form the currency of commoning and (supposed) democratization. As Steven Miles (2020) has observed, experience is “the new ideological terrain of consumer society,”[44] and the immersive art experiences created by the IDAEs are part of this development. It would be wrong to completely deny the art-historical and cultural educational aspirations of the Lumières IDAEs. As described above, Culturespaces, in addition to protecting, preserving and managing cultural heritage, also pursues a mission of art and cultural education. However, this is designed to be low-threshold, barrier-free and inclusive in the sense of art/exhibitions for everyone, and thus fits into the latest developments in inclusive, radical-democratic museum work and exhibition curating. In order not to disturb the emotionally overwhelming impression of the total-image show, the knowledge-conveying information and text-based parts about the exhibited artists, as well as the historical significance of the exhibition venue, are largely reduced and visually banished to the extremities, supporting pillars, niches or internal building elements of the main exhibition space.[45]

Could the Ateliers des Lumiéres be categorized as digital art museums due to their (albeit reduced) educational mission, public accessibility, barrier-free approach and inclusion, as well as their establishment as permanent institutions—a term with which, as mentioned above, the teamLab Boderless exhibition institutions, for example, define themselves? Based on the 2023 definition of a museum by ICOM,[46] this must be denied. The Lumières digital art centers do not have their own collection of pictures and objects to preserve, research, interpret and exhibit; they only use copyright-free art images that are available digitally. Its real treasure is the proprietary, innovative audio-visual technology used to present the IDAEs. In contrast to public museums as cultural institutions, Culturespaces is a private sector player that develops and markets profit-oriented, commercial art exhibitions as immersive digital experiences worldwide. It is dedicated to the business idea of capitalizing on the symbolic image capital of art history in an experience-oriented manner. With the step towards digital art screening, it deliberately distances itself from the philosophy and setting of conventional museum exhibitions. Adapting and expanding the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the digital art centers of the Lumières type can be considered the cathedrals of the digital image society. They satisfy the human need for visual spectacle, an emotionally moving Big Picture Show. Due to their immersive spectatorship, they blend in with the lineage, visual history and viewing culture of panoramas, IMAX film screenings, and planetarium shows; visually overwhelming, they offer “spectacle over substance”[47] and thus take a central position in the history of entertainment and tourism.

Birgit Mersmann is Professor of Contemporary Art and Digital Image Cultures at the University of Bonn, Germany. Her interdisciplinary research covers modern and contemporary Western and East Asian art, global art history, migratory aesthetics, museum and exhibition studies, digital art, image and media theory, visual cultures and visual translation, interrelations between script and image, and history and theory of photography. Recent book publications include: Kritik des Neo-Extraktivismus in der Gegenwartskunst (ed. with Hauke Ohls, Lüneburg 2024); Image Controversies. Contemporary Iconoclasm in Art, Media, and Cultural Heritage (ed. with Christiane Kruse and Arnold Bartetzky; Berlin/Boston 2024); Okzidentalismen. Projektionen und Reflexionen des Westens in Kunst, Kultur und Ästhetik (ed. with Hauke Ohls, Bielefeld 2022); Über die Grenzen des Bildes. Kulturelle Differenz und transkulturelle Dynamik im globalen Feld der Kunst (Bielefeld 2021); Bildagenten. Historische und zeitgenössische Bildpraxen in globalen Kulturen (ed. with Christiane Kruse; Paderborn 2021); Handbook of Art and Global Migration. Theories, Practices, and Challenges (ed. with Burcu Dogramaci; Berlin/Boston 2019).