A Journey from Virtual and Mixed Reality to Byzantine Icons via Buddhist Philosophy

Abstract

In the context of contemporary digital art and documentary making, practitioners are discovering the possibilities given by emerging image-based immersive practices, techniques and tools (360-degree video and photography; virtual, augmented, and mixed reality) to wrap viewers in the image and to blur the distance between viewer and viewed, ‘self’ and ‘other’. Challenging the distinction between presence and absence and between body and mind, these practices also seem to attack another set of divides, i.e. between past and present, here and there. An intrinsic part of late-modern, industrial, capitalist societies new experiences in immersive visual documentary and art (MR and VR especially) contain traces of continuity with the visualities that characterise other (non-modern) places and times. They share some of the core principles that characterise the visuality of, for instance, Byzantine icons, as well those of Hindu popular religious art. Based on the concrete analysis of a selected number of examples gathered form the world of contemporary MR and VR performance art this article suggests that art is always the result of a dialogue across the elsewhere and the ‘elsewhen’. Underpinning this article is also the idea that an act of decolonisation of knowledge, enacted by means of the use of categories imported from other epistemologies (such as Byzantine and Hindu image theory as well as Buddhist philosophy) can help us look at contemporary emerging arts and documentary practices with new eyes.