One of the trends – or tensions – that innervate immersive art in its current phase of growth and maturation, one of the most fertile and promising is the tendency to reflect on space, on the borders of vision. Technically speaking, immersive art is, by its own constitution, something that goes beyond bi-dimensionality, but we know this is not about technology alone. This is about semantic horizon, field of expressional investigation, ranges of meaning.
Over the Rainbow tests the elsewhere. And since it shows a 360-degree view, one wonders where exactly would this elsewhere be. Nothing is out of field, everything is potentially into the field. Ay, there’s the rub. The director, Craig Quintero, comes from theatre. I will add that the relationship between immersive art and theatre is of utmost interest, today. Quintero’s intention is to trans-codify the typical sensorial involvement of live theatre into immersive art filmed in 360 degrees. This proposition forces the director to clash with the concept of limit, of space, of separation. It is indeed from separation that the concept of frame begets this conceptual, thick symbolic art that, like in a chess match against a computer, ends into an ode to human alienation. To dispersion. To lose, and to get lost, is human, and very beautiful.
OVER THE RAINBOW
Best of Immersive
by Craig Quintero (Taipei, 11’)