On immersion, presence, and why the frame had to disappear
Ivó Kovács · ivo3d.com
From 19th-century panoramas to architectural video mapping: media artist Ivo Kovács traces the history and theory of immersion and spatial presence.
I have spent the better part of two decades projecting light onto surfaces that were never designed to receive it — cathedral facades, purpose-built sculptural objects, civic walls in the middle of the night. What keeps drawing me back to this practice is a question I have never fully resolved: at what point does a viewer stop looking at an image and start being inside one?
This is not a new question. It is, in fact, one of the oldest ambitions in the history of art.
Long before digital projectors existed, panorama painters in 19th-century London and Paris were building circular rotundas designed to suppress the edge of the canvas entirely. Visitors descended into a darkened room and found themselves, apparently, standing on a hilltop overlooking a battlefield or a city skyline. The frame had disappeared. What remained was the sensation of being there. We call this immersion — and its logic has not fundamentally changed in two hundred years, even as its technical means have transformed beyond recognition.
What has changed is the relationship between the image and time. The painted panorama was static; you could look, but you could not influence what you saw. Contemporary immersive environments — responsive, generative, computationally alive — are constituted by the viewer’s presence within them. The work does not exist in a fixed state. It becomes itself through the body moving through it.
This shift carries theoretical weight. When Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that the body does not observe space but inhabits it, he was describing something that immersive art now literalises: the dissolution of the distance between perceiver and perceived. Scale, acoustic depth, responsive light — these are not decorative tools. They are the architecture of a different kind of attention.
Over the years I have tried to map this territory through my own practice — at competition facades, at medieval churches, at purpose-built installations — and through the theoretical frameworks that help me understand what I am actually doing when I ask a viewer to surrender their sensory horizon.
The Q&A below is an attempt to make that map legible.
→ Read: The Architecture of Experience — 10 Questions on Immersion
