playing god

Delusion is the most important aspect of art itself. Art is, and always has been the mind’s opportunity to escape reality, for what purpose does art serve if not to take us somewhere? Artists and consumers alike yearn to be so completely immersed in something that we are able to momentarily forget about the realities that being a real person in a real world presents. We all long for something more. We all possess a little pocket in our gut that truly believes in all of our wildest fantasies. This is your delusion. Art is what allows you to access it.

Living in the digital age, it is not so difficult to comprehend art as a completely immersive experience. As technology has advanced, we are able to be more sensorially stimulated whilst consuming art, from the shift to “talkie” movies from silent films in the 1930s, to the introduction of video games in the 60s and 70s, perhaps the newest art medium which uniquely adds individual control over the consumer’s experience. Now, with tools accessible to us such as VR technology or stereo sound systems, disconnecting from reality is simply a matter of effective noise cancellation and blackout curtains, requiring a remarkably small amount of effort to engage the imagination and become completely engrossed in the media being consumed.

While it is easy to assume that immersion in art developed alongside these relatively contemporary technologies, the immersive experience has existed for as long as art itself. Large paintings like Remrandt’s The Night Watch, for example, exemplify how, without current technology which helps us experience art in a multi-sensorial manner, we can feel immersed within the art due to the combination of its sheer weight, scale and beauty. When standing in the same room as the painting it is impossible to escape its grasp as it draws you into the world of the Dutch militia, creating an experience that is most likely alien to you, but also trapping you in that unfamiliar world, granting you a beautiful sense of belonging. This is true immersion, sans speakers or LEDs, this is simply beautiful art.

Beauty is an essential part of the immersive experience as the audience. I personally believe that for art to be worth experiencing at all it must contain some amount of beauty. However, there is a popular misconception about what beauty truly is. People tend to gravitate towards the idea that beauty corresponds to ‘prettiness,’ as in, the purely aesthetic pleasantry of something, something completely subjective that is derived from simply materialistic attraction to something. Beauty, however, is a different kind of attractive force, it is the quality that feeds the carnal desire to feel anything. Something beautiful is something tantalizing, something that holds your attention, something inescapable. By this definition, not all beauty is pleasant, in fact, most beauty is not, as stated by Donna Tartt in The Secret History “Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.” Experiencing ‘true’ beauty is feeling trapped, being unable to look away from something as it triggers some feeling deep within you, something akin to terror or shock, leaving you disembodied and alienated from the experience of reality. In this way, beauty can be pretty, but it is also violent, dangerous and ugly. It is also the reason we, as  humans, value beautiful, or good, art in such a profound manner. Art that is able to make us feel so intensely reminds us of our humanity in a way that can only be described as beautiful. It satiates our innate desire to be a part of something larger, to understand a world in its entirety, which is the key to a truly immersive experience.

A good artist will exploit their audience’s delusion and invite them into the world of their art. Artists are manipulative in this way, they aim to strip their audience of their control over their emotions. The best of artists can entrap audiences without them even realizing it, creating art that plagues the mind for hours, days, even a lifetime after bearing witness to it. They employ the technology of their time to create an immersive, beautiful experience, tricking the consumer into accessing their delusion to travel someplace else.

At the heart of creating art is making toys. More specifically, the kind of toys that combine, or add up. Think: building blocks, LEGOs, KNEX, etc. Now, forget about instruction packets and labeled bags, and imagine the torso-sized box of reject and misfit pieces stored at the back of your grandmother’s closet. Creating engaging art is manufacturing those, less specific, pieces. As an artist, you should not aim to deliver a finished product, nor a jigsaw, where all of the components lead to one sure answer, but you want to let your audience respond to your art creatively. In your art, you want to give your audience something to conceptualize, providing them with the foundation of your imagined work, and letting them fill in the blanks themselves. This is the power of engagement, and what I call the ‘bodiless medium’: imagination.

In the universal sense, art can never be finished. No artwork is ever truly complete if there are more eyes to fall upon it in its future. Art as a personal concern, however, can be finished only once you stop thinking about it. This means that art is created via the simple act of thinking, and that art can be a completely incorporeal product when experienced through the lens of an individual. To summarize, the imagination, once fueled with some sort of external fragments derived from existing art, becomes its own medium to create art within the mind’s consciousness. Additionally, the imagination is by far the least limited medium in terms of its creating capabilities, while also the most constrained in outward expression  given that most artists, at one time or another, have grappled with the imagining of something, but are not able to express it exactly how it appears in their mind. Essentially, we are each our own audience to the most beautiful works of art, while remaining unable to share it.

Artists do much more than create art, they build worlds. Here is where the concept of ‘world building’ really comes into play, with the combination of immersion and imagination. In my opinion, the most beautiful and effective, in a general sense, the ‘best’ art will draw you into the world the artist has already created, and then make you feel so emotionally connected to it that you begin to expand that world past the original work, and you begin to create your own work in your head. This is the kind of art that draws you back to it, that you can’t stay away from. The book from your childhood that you read every few months, the painting that you make your phone homescreen because you can’t bear to not look at it on command. It is the compulsion to understand so much about the art itself so it informs your own imagination. This kind of art is so powerful that it can draw people together, create communities of appreciation and discussion that fuel your own imagination using the ideas produced by others’.

These communities of fans are what fosters the survival of the original work, and what facilitates the creation of new art. As I spoke to before, a piece of art will never remain static while people continue to think about it, therefore, communities can help to keep a piece of art alive when simply discussing it with peers, what this relies on, however, is in the common understanding of what that art is. While each individual has their own world that they have created in their imagination, which may infinitely vary between minds, there is a shared knowledge of the foundational aspects that can only exist by bearing witness to the original art itself. This is where theatre begins to suffer as a medium.

Theatre is a fleeting art, and it must come to terms with that reality. In a world where we are increasingly expecting to have copies, replicas, original work mass produced and on demand, we have begun to stop appreciating the untouchable delicacy of an beautifully impermanent experience. When was the last time you looked up a song that was stuck in your head? Reread a book on your overflowing bookshelf? Bought a movie instead of renting it, because you thought you would like to come back and watch it again later? These are all examples of accessible art. If you desire to experience a work of art, it’s likely available to you in one way or another. This is not a bad thing. Both audience and artist benefit from this system of art accessibility, a direct economic retribution and instantaneous appreciation for one’s art can both provide the artist with the means to create more art and the motivation to produce more rapidly. From an audience standpoint, you are no longer required to buy a ticket and wait in an hour-long line in Manhattan if you are interested in seeing a Rothko hung at the MOMA, a novelty which I’m positive society will not miss. Either way, increasing accessibility in the artistic world is a blessing for nearly everybody, but to theatre-artists, it has proven to be somewhat of a kick in the shins.

Theatre runs away from us. We, as a digitalized society, are unfamiliar with the experience of losing a memory. We have photos, videos, recordings that are capable of capturing our experiences and perpetuating them. Theatre, reliant on the space it is viewed in as part of the art itself, is unable to be permanentized in the same way. Think of everything from ProShots to YouTube bootlegs; when experiencing theatre through a camera lens, it loses its life. We forget in the moment that a work of theatre is impermanent, and that we will always lose the feeling we had in the moment of witnessing it unfold. 

With increasing reliance on convenience in our society, theatre has begun to suffer as an art form. Theatre depends on the audience’s willingness to play the role of an audience. It requires its viewers to be reactive people, to have personality and to be able to respond to the art in real time for it to be appreciated. Instead, we are often made hyper aware of the experience of being in a theater,  distracting us from being drawn into the art. The issue with theatre as a matter of convenience is that it asks the audience to essentially trap themselves in a box for hours at a time and to be solely focused on the performance. In a world where people have learned to pause and rewind, you can imagine that this may prove to be a challenge for many. A distracted audience detracts from the experience itself, which is essential to the medium of theatre.

The experience of live theatre is incomparable to almost any other form of art. Live theatre is an experience that is unable to be replicated in any capacity, as a completely dynamic form of art, that interacts with the world around it as it is being created. Theatre is always in motion when it doesn’t cease to exist. Any performer can tell you that a live performance is always substantially different to the art created in rehearsal, and that each performance varies from one to the other. This is also experienced as an audience member, and when viewing theatre it is expected that you are viewing, in some way, a different piece of art than another audience member watching a different performance, even of the show. Possibly, even during the same performance, as your experience may depend upon where you are sat for example, an audience member with an obstructed view will likely have a different experience than someone who is seated in the front row. Theatre is a medium that is necessarily experiential compared to, say, reading a book or looking at a piece of visual art, where the experience does not certainly affect one’s perception of it. This, while it separates theatre from other forms of art, making it possibly more powerful in the moment of watching it, impedes its ability to to create community surrounding a single piece of art, therefore inhibiting its world building potential as a medium, due to the community it creates lacking a shared perspective on a single piece of art, instead creating a community based on the medium as a whole.

There is immense power in the fleeting form that theatre takes, it forces us to cope with the reality that even beautiful things will eventually meet their end, and that the past is unattainable and unchanging, our own pasts remaining within the ever-distorting world of memory. Let’s say, for example, you see a show on its opening night, the show is the best you’ve ever seen, and because of how much you loved it, you go back and watch it, time and time again. Sometimes it’s worse than that first experience, occasionally it’s even better, but either way, you know it’s never exactly the same. This is the visible power of a truly dynamic art form. Theatre, as it relies on humanity as its creator as well as its medium, must always be in motion in the same way that humans are. The humanistic quality of theatre means that it is forever changing and unreliable on a performance-to-performance basis. You are entirely aware that that first experience cannot be exactly replicated because each time after will have been altered via the space it exists in at a different time.

Theatre can be greatly immersive when it embraces its impermanence. The solution to theatre’s world building issue is to bring people into the world within the limited time the audience shares with the art. I don’t know how this can be done, just that it has been done before. Otherwise, creating an immersive experience is entirely the choice of the artist, and must be interpreted genuinely to be effective.

How does the potentially ‘world-building’ quality of art have any impact on our actual world? So much of what I have discussed has remained within the bodiless state of the imagined world, though it is undebatable that art also has a hand in shaping and changing the physical world around us. Art, in all its forms, has taught us what ‘beauty’ means. It has shown us that the world is not a dull one, and that there is value in feeling, however unnecessary, as some nihilists may claim. Art gives us new life, stories to make and worlds to imagine. My goal as an aspiring artist, employing architecture as my medium, is not to build new worlds, though I have nothing but respect for artists that do, but rather to transform the existing world into one that is beautiful. 

Beauty, as I defined earlier, is the quality that makes one feel. Surprising as it may be, despite the raw power of beauty, it can often go unnoticed in our world. Here lies the question of form vs function. Form, falls under the umbrella of ‘prettiness.’ The aesthetic attractiveness of something. Function, however, is, in my opinion, extremely beautiful as a concept. There is so much power in considering function. Even in your obliviousness, someone is thinking about you. The way you move through the world. Even without realizing it, the art that surrounds constantly is immensely influential to the way you act, the way you feel.

I want to create art for humans. Art that they use and love and interact with. Art that is not for specific people, but for communities, society, for humanity. By harnessing the space that art takes in our physical world, we are able to become part of the imagined world. Instead of creating art that lets people create intangible worlds on their own, I want to reverse engineer this process, using the imagined world to transform the physical one. We as artists have the power to create, to ‘play God’ and build real, beautiful worlds. All it takes is a little consideration.