There is a conversation the immersive sector mostly has privately, and designboom has published an essay that has it out loud: when exhibitions become formats, what happens to the experience of art?
It is worth engaging with here rather than filing under art criticism, because the people reading this publication are frequently the ones building the formats.
What a format is
An exhibition used to be a one-off. A curator assembled works, in a building, for a period, and the thing was unrepeatable — the next venue got a different hang, different rooms, different light.
An immersive exhibition is increasingly a product with a spec. Content on a drive, a projector and audio schedule, a floor plan with tolerances, a lighting plot, an operations manual, a merchandise range and a staffing model. It opens in one city, runs, strikes, and opens in the next — and the whole apparatus is designed so that the experience in Chicago matches the experience in Lisbon.
The economics are compelling and unambiguous. Development cost is amortised across every venue. Technical risk is retired once. Marketing assets are reusable. Operations are proceduralised, so you can staff with people who have never installed a projector. And the audience is vastly larger than any single-venue show reaches — these things sell hundreds of thousands of tickets in cities that have no contemporary art audience to speak of.
The genuine case for it
It would be easy and lazy to be snobbish about this, so the case deserves stating properly.
Reach. A touring format shows work to people who would never enter a contemporary art institution. That is not a small thing, and the art world’s historical answer to the access problem — outreach programmes and free Fridays — has been much less effective.
It funds technical ambition. A show that will run in twelve cities can afford equipment, R&D and crew that a single venue cannot. Some of the most technically accomplished immersive work exists because it was built as a format.
It creates stable employment. Touring formats employ technicians, operators and installers continuously, in a sector otherwise structured around precarious project work. For a lot of people reading this, formats are the thing that pays.
And replicability is not inherently anti-art. A play runs eight times a week in different theatres. A score is performed by different orchestras. Reproducibility has been fine in other art forms for centuries.
What actually gets lost
The last point is also where the argument turns, because the comparison to theatre and music reveals what is missing.
A score is re-interpreted. A format is re-installed. Every orchestra plays Mahler differently, and the difference is the art form. A touring immersive show is engineered specifically so that the difference does not occur — variance is a defect in the operations manual. The replicability is of the output, not of the interpretation, and that is a genuinely different relationship.
Site-specificity becomes impossible by design. The strongest immersive work we cover is usually inseparable from where it is: Abramović in a flooded Copenhagen reservoir, LAS staging work in a Berlin power station and a nightclub, RADIANCE built into one concert hall’s lighting system. None of those can tour, and the reason they are good is the reason they cannot.
The venue stops being a collaborator and becomes a box with a required ceiling height. Which is a real loss of a whole dimension of the work.
And the format logic selects for a particular kind of content — spectacular, legible in ninety seconds, photographable, non-verbal, culturally unspecific enough to work in twelve markets, and uncontroversial enough to be sponsorable. That is a set of constraints, and like all constraints it produces a house style.
The question for anyone building this
If you make immersive work, the format model will eventually be offered to you, and it is worth deciding in advance which decisions you are willing to hand over.
The useful questions are concrete rather than philosophical:
- Does the work have a canonical version, or does each installation get authored? If the answer is canonical, you are making a format whether you call it one or not.
- Who decides the room? If the spec dictates dimensions and the venue supplies them, the architecture has stopped being yours.
- What varies by city, and who chooses? Something should. If nothing does, you have built a product.
- And what happens in year five, when the equipment it was specced for is obsolete and the operations manual outlives your involvement?
None of those have a correct answer. But answering them deliberately is the difference between licensing your work and discovering that your work has become a licence.