Ambiances Environnement sensible, architecture et espace urbain
Varia | 2020 Varia
Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ambiances/3069 DOI: 10.4000/ambiances.3069 ISSN: 2266-839X
Publisher: Direction Générale des Patrimoines - DAPA - MCC, UMR 1563 - Ambiances Architectures Urbanités (AAU)
Electronic reference Varia, 2020, Ambiances [Online], connection on 22 December 2020. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/ambiances/3069 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ambiances.3069
This text was automatically generated on 22 December 2020.
Ambiances is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Phenomenology of a Railway Expedition in China: The Gate, the Station, the Journey and the Arrival Junjie Xi and Paco Mejias Villatoro
Immersivity: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Spaces of Immersion Florian Freitag, Céline Molter, Laura Katharina Mücke, Helena Rapp, Damien B. Schlarb, Elisabeth Sommerlad, Clemens Spahr and Dominic Zerhoch
Ambiances , Varia 2
The Phenomenology of a Railway Expedition in China: The Gate, the Station, the Journey and the Arrival
Junjie Xi and Paco Mejias Villatoro
Introduction
Parallel lines across the landscape, wheels raised on steel, the power and momentum of the heavy locomotive leading its snake of carriages through a maze of switches, into and out of the tunnels, the passenger sitting a few feet above the ground, projected from the elements, hurtled from one town to the next while he reads a book or chats to friends or simply dozes, entirely freed from any responsibility for speed and steering, from any necessary engagement with the world he’s passing through. Surely this is the train experience everywhere. (Parks, 2014, p. 2)
1 This is a train travel experience described by Tim Parks in the book Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo. Is it true that all the train experiences are similar? And if not, what are the differences? What is so unique about train travel in China and how this has developed in the last decade? The train travel experience is neither a fashion nor a standard. Connected from the very beginning to modernity, train infrastructures are the positive result of industrialization and globalization as they serve people in contemporary living.
2 The railway was introduced in China by the British merchant Durand in 1864. He built a 600-metre narrow-gauge railroad in Beijing outside the Xuanwu Gate to demonstrate the technology to the imperial court. However, it was soon demolished because the Qing government said that it “scared the dragon” and was not good for Feng Shui. After several attempts, the first railways in China were built during the late 19th century, after extensive railway networks had already been established in Europe, North America, India and Japan. From the time of the First Opium War (1839–1842) to the end
Ambiances , Varia 3
of the Qing Dynasty (1911), the Chinese railroad was developed relying on foreign investment, and controlled partly by the Russian and Japanese Empires.
3 The development of the Chinese railway system was framed by two significant political conditions: one foreign and the other one domestic. From the foreign point of view, the growth began during a very special political moment, marked by the Xinhai Revolution stating the end of China’s last imperial dynasty and establishing the Republic of China. From the Revolution of 1911 to the Nationalist Party retreat to Taiwan in 1949, the main use of railway lines and railway stations was related to wars. Railway towns, as a type of settlement, began to be developed during that time. For example, Changchun in China was originally built by the Japanese as a “model town” as part of Japan’s imperialist modernization, following the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932. David D. Buck suggests that in its first manifestation, as a railway city and the capital of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, Changchun represented the inland extension of the foreign-dominated treaty-port forms that so strongly shaped modern urbanism in China. A second major railway town was designed and built from 1905 by the South Manchuria Railway, inspired by Russian railway towns such as Dalian. It was based on the rectangular system, which contrasted with the circular walled town of old Changchun, and grid patterns became the standard for Chinese railway towns. This first development of the railway infrastructure in China was mostly controlled by the colonialist empires: Russia, Germany and Japan took over the decisions about the urban layout and the image provided by the trains’ infrastructures and stations (Chen, 2013).
4 From the domestic point of view, the development was framed in a contradictory ideological push of modernity. From the point at which the People’s Republic of China was founded (1949), a wholly new symbology was necessary for the representation of the new ideology on all scales, from a “spatial revolution” to an infrastructural one (Zhu, 2009, p. 75). As Jianfei Zhu explains, this new era was initially commanded by architects and planners who studied abroad, particularly in the United States, and who, once back in China, were required to study Mao’s writings and examine the Soviet Russian examples as a way to “reform their ‘bourgeois’ thinking”. Under pressure from the Communist Party of China and its “proletarian dictatorship”, Chinese architects were involved in the definition of the new China, but they lacked the necessary autonomy to achieve the “critical practice” tied to modernism (ibid., p. 104).
5 Within this frame, two events – the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) – are often considered as representing restrictions to China’s modernization. Both events happened in a highly politicized and radicalized society, which expressly dismissed professional expertise, considering it counter-revolutionary, a fact that resulted in a shortage of the specialists and professional talents necessary to achieve modernity. In the process of modernization, train stations, as buildings, symbolized technological progress and economic power. Elisabeth Köll argues in her book Railroads and the Transformation of China that, as an important part of China’s economic and social reconstruction, railroads did not escape the reach of the mass political campaigns of the late 1950s and 1960s. Providing services to achieve the economic and political goals of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, railroads “simultaneously became both agents and victims of these destructive campaigns” (Köll, 2019, p. 254).
Ambiances , Varia 4
6 During the Great Leap Forward, the mobility between urban and rural environments, which mostly happened through the railway network, was strictly invigilated to control the movement of the population and goods between both environments. In the Cultural Revolution, technical inefficiencies and economic mismanagements were common in an infrastructure politically devoted to spreading Mao’s message across the country and overwhelmed by a crowd of teenage Red Guards. In both cases, the railway infrastructure was dismissed as a tool for technical progress – in a closer understanding of modernity’s rational principles – and became a political instrument. This controversy between the political and technological capacities of the railway infrastructure lasted until Chairman Mao’s death in 1976. Then, as Köll explains, Deng Xiaoping “immediately recognised the importance of a well-functioning rail sector for economic growth” (ibid., p. 256).
7 Recorded by Xiong Wang in his book China Speed: Development of China’s High-speed Rail, on 26 October 1978, sitting on the flying high-speed bullet train, the new Chinese mandatary, Deng Xiaoping, was serene and calm. Mountains, lakes, villages and fields were flashing by on both sides of the train. Inside the compartment, the screen read: 210 km/hr. One reporter among Deng’s entourage asked him, “As far as we know, sir, this is your first high-speed train ride. How do you like it?” Deng answered readily, “Fast, it runs like the wind, and it feels like pushing you to run; we’re sitting on the right train.” (Wang, 2016, p. 2). Two months later, the 3rd Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China was held in Beijing and marked the beginning of China’s reform. Deng Xiaoping understood the impossibility of positioning China in the world of the future without accomplishing the technical development that is connected to modernity. It was at that moment when official discussions began in order to develop a high-speed train network in China. The fact that it took more than 20 years to start operational lines is not surprising if the aforementioned historical background is considered. With the politically centred failed approaches to modernity represented by the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, China, under its new leadership, recognized the necessity of providing a more technical and economical approach. This was the beginning of a re-emergence of “modernity”, as suggested by Thoralf Klein, as a master narrative that took place in the 1990s (ibid.).
8 The year that Beijing hosted the 2008 Summer Olympics marked 30 years of China’s reform. One year before, China had begun a new generation of passenger-dedicated high-speed railway (HSR) services, and since then over 300 stations have been built or renovated to accommodate high-speed trains. By the end of 2019, in just a few years, China had over 35,000 km of HSR lines – more than the addition of all the other high- speed train networks in the rest of the world and representing 70% of the total global network (Aldama, 2020).
9 In order to explore the Chinese approach to modernization, the phenomenology of the experience of a journey on board a high-speed train can be analysed. As Ariane Mildenberg states, phenomenology and modernity are interlaced (Mildenberg, 2017, p. 2). Both are based on a “primordial faith” in the interrogation of the perceptual (in phenomenology) or historical (in modernity) experiences that encourage openness. The idea of a “pre-theoretical” situation, as an experience built through only the relationship with things and facts, is shared by modernity’s dismissal of history and by the phenomenological approach to experience (ibid., p. 5–6).
Ambiances , Varia 5
10 The authors will now explore the experience of the journey through four different stages: the gate, the station, the journey and the arrival.
Methodology
11 The authors applied phenomenology as a methodological approach through four stages of a railway journey: the gate, the station, the journey and the arrival. From 2016 to 2019, with the substantial support from a research grant awarded by Xi’an Jiaotong- Liverpool University, the authors visited 50 railway stations across China, following different railway routes. The information about the trips is listed in the table below with repeated journeys excluded.
Table 1: The railway journeys conducted by the authors from 2016‑2019
Ambiances , Varia 6
Table 2: Other stations visited without entering the platforms
12 During the research excursions, the authors observed and recorded the contemporary railway experiences, making comparisons with the Western context and possible connections between both experiences and their particular approaches to modernity. The map below shows the research trips conducted by the authors through the railway network in China.
Ambiances , Varia 7
Illustration 1: Caption: Map of the high-speed railway network in China 2019 with the routes travelled by the authors highlighted
The thickness of the lines corresponds to the speed of the route (from thicker to thinner: ≥300 km/h, ≥250 km/h, ≥200 km/h, respectively) Source: Jian, Zhen (Ed), 2019. A study of the 13th Five-Year Plan for the development and planning of railway road. Beijing: China Railway Publishing House Copyright: the authors
The Gate: Confinement and Monumentality
13 Functionally, train stations are buildings in between two worlds: the engineered infrastructure and the architecture of the city. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch explains, the station functions as a kind of gateway, which has to connect two very different types of traffic and spaces with one another: the traffic space of the city and that of the railroad. One element of the station, the neoclassical stone buildings, belongs to the city; the other part, the steel and glass construct, is a pure function of the railroad’s “industrial” side (Schivelbusch, 1977, p. 162). This difference is an essential part of the experience of leaving: a dissolution of the materiality of the city, which goes from the particularities of the urban context that are left behind to the anonymity of the rail tracks that lie ahead.
14 The experience mentioned above is easily recognized as part of the Western context, where train infrastructures were generated during an essential stage of the reconfiguration of the cities, hence becoming an integrated part of the urban extensions and refurbishments during the mid-19th century (following the examples of London and Paris). Even when, later on, some Western cities fronted the reconfiguration of stations in order to adapt them to the new conditions of the HSR,
Ambiances , Varia 8
this was mostly completed with an attempt to retain the proximity between the old and new facilities or, at least, between the new facilities and the main core of the city.
15 When referring to the Chinese context, the situation changes: mostly located in suburban or even ex-urban contexts (Chen, Wei, 2013), often not well connected by public transportation, and surrounded by unproportioned public spaces, the new high- speed railway stations provide a different experience. Technical, financial and strategic factors have been argued as explaining this fact, and all of these have, in some way, a connection with the understanding of Chinese modernization.
16 The stations are dispersed due to technical difficulties in accommodating the alignments of the high-speed track and its demands for high-radius curves within a city planned in the context of the Cultural Revolution (Haixiao, Ya, 2019, p. 61). During that time, following Mao’s anti-urban and anti-professional push, most of the planning was commanded by the working class, resulting in uncoordinated and misguided decisions regarding the development of future infrastructures (Qian, 2014). With an emphasis on the industrial enhancement of cities, most of the infrastructural layouts completed during that time were focused on connecting industries and moving goods rather than providing transportation for people.
17 It is also clear that suburban and ex-urban locations are cheaper in terms of the necessary compensation and relocation of people, with the rural population being a more docile one in terms of accepting drastic top-down initiatives. Most of the new peripheral stations have been built on small outlying villages or their associated farmlands. They have been planned with the idea of provoking further development to increase the value of the land and, in doing so, alleviating the payback of the infrastructure investment. Most of these plans have not been very successful in attracting investors and developers; for instance, the Wuhan railway station master plan, created in 2007, is now clearly underdeveloped, a fact that is very significant within the context of the usual Chinese fast pace or urban transformation (Illustration 2).
Illustration 2: Left, the vision of the Wuhan station master plan and right, the “urban axis” still waiting to be developed in 2019
Source left: Comprehensive Plan for Wuhan Yangchun-lake Sub-centre, 2007 (from the official website of Wuhan Land Resource and Planning Bureau: http://www.wpl.gov.cn Copyright left: Wuhan Land Resource and Planning Bureau Source and Copyright right: the authors
18 The peripheral situation of the stations has also been explained as part of a wider urban strategy based on a model of urban transformation: from the centric to the polycentric city. This strategy is difficult to trust if, as Pan Haixiao and Gao Ya suggest, the decision is not accompanied by proper planning of the connection between the different cores,
Ambiances , Varia 9
which, in the case of China, is highly flawed in most cases (Haixiao, Ya, 2019, p. 61). For instance, 38% of the people arriving at the stations on the Beijing-Shanghai line arrived by taxi, as a demonstration of the lack of a coordinated effort between intercity and local mobility (ibid., p. 68).
19 Without entering a broad discussion about modernity (from the urban exaltation of Baudelaire to the political reading of Foucault, or from those who consider multiple modernities, such as Eisenstadt, to those such, as Latour, who denies its existence), what is undeniable is that the situation described has a connection with the particularity of the Chinese modernity or with its process of modernization. The common components mentioned as substantial elements relating to this “modernity” are the emergence of industrial capitalism and the derived process of urbanization; the intensification of global communication; and the spread of scientific rationality (Klein, 2014, p. 278). However, these concepts are conditioned by a capitalist plot that cannot be directly linked to the Chinese case. As Klein points out, instead of trying to fit China into an official (and Western) narrative of modernity, it would seem more interesting to be able to delineate its particularities, with the “tensions within modernity” being one of the most intriguing ones (p. 280). The tensions between different spatial–social entities (such as city and countryside) and between a singular and plural reading of modernity are the most useful for understanding the Chinese process of modernization. These pressures were at the base of problems such as the Great Famine (the greatest human-made disaster in history), when urban collectives deprived individuals from the countryside of decisions about their own agricultural production, forcing an impulse of modernity by bringing rationalization and bureaucratic planning (p. 288). The same tensions can still be recognized through the dismissal of rural environments and the conflict between public and private interest in the questionable decisions relating to the placement of HSR stations, as discussed before.
20 The initial confrontation between urban and rural populations created by the Great Leap Forward has lasted until present times. As Klein reminds us, Chinese peasants are even today considered “second-class citizens”, with the semantics of the word “peasant”, as they are referred to by the Chinese, connected with pre-modern terms as “feudalism” and “superstition”. This condition accompanies the peasants even when they move to the urban, transforming the Chinese urban context into a place with uneven modernity (Ibid., p. 286–287).
21 Once at the station, it is easy to recognize the gate as an entry. The gate has always had an important symbolic meaning in the history of China. Segregated by administrative divisions and subdivisions, the ancient Chinese city was characterized by a continuous transition through gates (paifang). Even now, an isolated paifang has become the most characteristic representation of a Chinese neighbourhood in Western cities. Without pointing out the historical importance of seclusion and the gate as the transition between parts, it is difficult to understand the idea of a city where parts are more formally independent, as happens, for instance, through the remote location of the HSR stations mentioned before or through the proliferation of gated communities in China.
22 As stated earlier, the transition to the stations – the initial point of departure – in the Western context is smooth and integrated within the existing city, a fact that could be related to a fundamental difference in the significance of the journey. Travelling in compact Europe cannot be compared with travelling in the huge territory of China, where displacements sometimes supposed an all-live-time separation. In the poem “A
Ambiances , Varia 10
Song in the Name of the Town of Wei”, written by Wang Wei from the Tang Dynasty (7th to 10th century AD), he described his emotions when he was sending his friend to the west of China. In the poem, he expressed a contradictory feeling of melancholy tinted by excitement for the future represented by a new beginning. These antonymous emotions capture the beginning of the journey perfectly. A morning drizzle in the Town of Wei light dust on the ground wets, outside the hostel willows, grow green and fresh. Bidding you farewell, I’d like to offer you one more toast, for west of the Sun Gate you won’t come across any old friend.
23 The perception of an overwhelming monumentality commonly characterizes the approach to the entry to a new HSR station in China. There are a few features of monuments (as stated by Giedion, Sert and Leger in their Nine Points on Monumentality, 1943) that can be easily recognized in the new Chinese railway stations: more than just strictly functional buildings, they are landmarks that express a unified consciousness of mighty economy. In a more contemporary reflection, in 2008 Larry Ford identified four dimensions of monumentality, namely: legibility, iconicity, integration with a major transportation hub, and a plan for developing a significant part of the existing city (Ford, 2008). Even though two of these characteristics (legibility and iconicity) have some degree of subjectivity (as stated by C. J. Smith, 2008), all four are to some degree recognizable in most of the new high-speed train stations in China. For a better understanding of the peculiarities of monumentality, Smith refers to two explicit questions about the decision-making process involved in these projects, both of which need to be reframed in the specificities of the Chinese political context: the first discusses the level of authoritarianism involved and the second debates the level of people’s acceptance when the project has been completed (ibid., p. 265). As Smith reminds us, in authoritarian places, where very few people are involved in the decisions affecting the city planning and where little attention is paid to users’ opinions, there is a crucial difference in the understanding of monumentality. Under the Chinese “red capitalism” (as Lin has referred to it), the State provides the fast and effective mobilization of the other agents and processes involved, from providing the land to encouraging developers and local governments, and facilitating the workforce through changing the restrictions on rural to urban migration (Lin, 1997). This top-down condition is balanced by a more bottom-up element (always on a governmental level) consisting of fierce competition between municipalities that use their progressively higher autonomy in decision-making for pushing their local economies and for promoting their local representatives to a national level.
24 Within this background, what can be perceived during the approach to the new Chinese high-speed train stations is a monumentality formally based on disproportionate public spaces and simple imagery. Scale and symmetry in monumental architecture are embraced by archaeologists as the primary vocabulary in past statements of power. The public space seems to act to underline the presence of the monumental station, with a total disregard for the pedestrian experience, resulting in unpleasant spaces to be in and even to cross. Unlike similar monumentalism in the European context, in the case of China, the unwelcoming effect of these spaces is magnified in most cases by the non- urban location of the new HSR stations. It is in the grandness of these spaces where the station is placed, axially and symmetrically, creating an indissoluble connection between both and containing unmistakable messages about economic and political power.
Ambiances , Varia 11
25 This monumentality of the public space became a reinterpretation of the vastness of some of the Chinese imperial architecture, in an exaggerated claim of identity after the colonialist era. For example, the now-destroyed E-Pang Palace – built in 212 BC in the western suburbs of today’s Xi’an, Shaanxi Province – covered a surface of 450 hectares, representing a monumental work that needed the commitment of over 700,000 workers. Another famous example is the Forbidden City Palace (constructed from 1406 to 1420), consisting of 980 buildings and covering 72 hectares. The public space that frames the Palace – Tiananmen Square – was enlarged in 1958, following the visionary concept of Chairman Mao. As reported by Adrian Hornsby, Mao initially stipulated that the square should be “big enough for one billion people, i.e. every single person in China [550 million at that time] plus a friend each from overseas” (Hornsby, 2009). The square is not only huge, with more than 20 hectares of purely pedestrian space, but also appears as strangely empty nowadays. At some points in time, Tiananmen Square fulfilled its practical duty, frequently hosting crowds numbering hundreds of thousands, and at its peak, in the first months of the Cultural Revolution, 11 million people congregated there over seven rallies. After the riots in 1989 (known as the “June Fourth Incident”), this space lost its original meaning and became a tightly controlled monumental void.
26 The public spaces around the new HSR stations are generally characterized by a similar empty monumentality. With common dimensions above five hectares (almost nine hectares in the two squares in Shijiazhuang, six hectares in Dunhuang and just over five hectares in Dalian), the spaces have been planned as isolated islands poorly connected to the surrounding city, and more as visual frames for the stations than as spaces for people (Illustration 3). In the blank canvas of these public spaces, the stations state a clear image all around, through upscaled buildings and imagery referring to distinct Chinese features or to stereotypical modernity.
Illustration 3: The square outside the Tianjin West railway station (left), 2017; the south square of Suzhou railway station, 2016 (right)
Source and Copyright: the authors
27 The Beijing West railway station (completed in 1996 and designed as the west gate of Beijing – shown in Illustration 4, left) boldly refers to China’s architectural heritage by imposing a series of traditional Chinese pavilions on the top of a monumentally scaled modern station. In this and other respects, the project shares certain affinities with Yang Tingbao’s Beijing railway station (Illustration 4, right), one of the ten major projects of 1959. However, the new project is larger in scale and incorporates more imagery of Chinese architectural features. As in Yang’s earlier station, the concourse
Ambiances , Varia 12
and the bulk are modern, both in planning and in the expression of materials and building structure; the traditional iconographic elements are concentrated primarily near the centre of the very extensive, 740-metre-long northern facade, in a prominent display of architectural symbolism (Rowe, Kuan, 2002, p. 182).
Illustration 4: Beijing West station (left); Beijing railway station (right)
Source and Copyright: the authors
28 Another more contemporary example is Dunhuang station (Illustration 5, left). The city of Dunhuang was a main stop on the ancient Silk Road and is best known for the Mogao Caves nearby. The railway station was built not long ago, in 2006, as the second-largest railway station in Gansu Province. Although the high-speed railway is not available yet, due to the city’s topography, the station already brings many benefits for the tourists visiting from nearby areas. The design of the station captures features of Dunhuang’s culture in the form of an ancient gate, including the saddle roof.
29 In some cases, the monumentality of the station is presented through sculptures rather than through the building itself – for example, the Dandong station in Liaoning Province, which is the gateway from China to North Korea (Illustration 5, right). Passengers can reach Pyongyang by train from Dandong within six hours. As a gateway, the station currently in use was completed in 2009, following a second reconstruction. Apart from all the signs being in both Mandarin and Korean, the station has few features of the local architecture. However, the station is the only one in China to retain a statue of Chairman Mao, which was erected in 1971 during the Cultural Revolution.
Illustration 5: Dunhuang railway station (left); Dandong railway station, 2017 (right)
Source and Copyright: the authors
Ambiances , Varia 13
30 Parallel to this series of stations devoted to the re-creation of Chinese symbolic features, there is another type that seems to point to a new, more contemporary image. Mostly projected through the different design institutes, stations such as Daqing West (Illustration 6, right), Shenyang South (Illustration 6, left) and Wuhu are aligned with what we could call a populist modernism, characterized by facades that retain symmetrical layouts, displaying a superficial lattice of horizontal lines, perhaps referring metaphorically to the speed of the train or allegorically to the rail tracks.
Illustration 6: Shenyang South railway station (left); Daqing West railway station (right)
Source and Copyright: the authors
31 In addition to this experiential approach – from the individual’s point of view – it is important to point here to the political significance of the stations. As Michel Foucault notes, the architecture promoted by the State has always had a mission going beyond just the configuration of space, which is to “permit an internal, articulated and detailed control” (1991, p. 172). If, as he reminds us, the hospital is an instrument of medical action and the school is a mechanism of training, it can be argued that the train stations in China are a mechanism of social docility (Ibid.) through their intimidating monumentality and their restricted access.
32 Even though in our post “nine-eleven” era, controlled access to strategic infrastructures is a common feature all over the world, this occurs in China in a very different manner than it does in the Western context. In the West, security controls take place with a level of discretion that aims to dissipate the unwelcoming effect of it, smoothing the transition from the free and open space of the city to the controlled space of the station. Identity checks rarely happen in Western stations and the security checks take place further in on our way to the platforms (sometimes on the platforms themselves), rendering the station’s main halls an extension of the open space of the city.
33 In contrast, the experience of entering a Chinese railway station is commonly characterized by an intense feeling of restriction. Handrails are everywhere, and a programmed method of directing the flow of people takes over the experience of the entrance, overflowing from the doors and occupying the outside public space, which has become partially restricted too. Under the argument of public safety – the same argument that supports the massive presence of surveillance cameras in the public space – the experience of approaching train stations is homogenized through selected paths and perspectives that are far from simply casual decisions. Passengers need to go through a security area before entering the station, and tickets need to be checked at
Ambiances , Varia 14
the same time as passengers’ identity cards. China deployed a real-name ticket sale system from 2010, as a way of trying to stop ticket scalping and improving railway security, with “security”, as mentioned before, a code-word for control. Foreign travellers can only collect their tickets from the ticket office in the train station with their passports, which is often described as inconvenient for frequent travellers. The physical confinement in the station’s entrance is, in this way, completed by wider confinement in the city, based on the official recording of your movements and on the necessity of the authorities’ approval for departing. The restriction of the right to move is then a consequence of the restriction of the right to stay, which in China is controlled through the necessity of holding a registration certificate (hukou) for being a resident in any place. All these restrictions are principles that challenge the defence of individual freedom embedded in the ideology of modernity – obstructions that are paradoxically overlapped with the impressive display of technological modernity.
34 All these unfamiliarities frame the experience of the departure in accordance with Marcel Proust’s statement that the beginning of the rail journey implies the end of our familiar routines and the beginning of the strangeness of the world (1981, p. 694).
Inside the Station
35 The monumental perception of the outside of the train stations is usually continued in the interior. Generally, based on a big-hall scheme, the spaces could be extremely crowded or surprisingly empty, depending on the time of year (Illustration 7). During the Chunyun or spring festival – the largest annual human migration in the world – around 3 billion displacements happen during a period of 40 days (2019 data reported by The South China Morning Post). This massive migration is mostly undertaken by train, provoking the collapse of train stations across China. The necessity of accommodating this peak moment would explain the oversized interior spaces at the stations. Statistics show that trains are the most-used intercity method of transport in China. According to the 2017 China Statistical Yearbook, the passenger volume of railway transport during that year exceeded 2.8 billion, which is 3.7 times the combined total of passengers who travelled by water and civil aviation transport (Huan, 2018).
Illustration 7: A crowded Hankou railway station, 2019 (left); empty steps of Changchun West railway station, 2017 (right)
Source and Copyright: the authors
36 Once seated in the waiting hall, the limits of the space become lost in between the crowds or diffused by the huge distances, provoking the dissolution of the architectural
Ambiances , Varia 15
space. Open daily to the waiting areas, there are shops and restaurants. Toilets are often arranged on the two sides of the station, facing the waiting areas and widely open. The smell of urine keeps passengers away from these areas, an odour that gradually transforms into pot noodles and other Chinese food as passengers progress along the hall. The sound of the speakers echoes in the space, while the lights are reflected in the shiny floors that are so characteristic of Chinese public buildings, contributing too in this way to the dematerialization of the space. Due to their vast dimensions, these main halls are not well air-conditioned, with sometimes no difference between the outdoor temperature and the interior one, reinforcing an open-space feeling. The limited ventilation makes it almost unbearably hot in summer when some of the stations need to display ice containers in a desperate attempt to cool down the space (see Illustration 8, left, showing summer in Suzhou station). The monochromatic materiality of the space (usually pale grey or white) lightens the interior, underlining the colour of the people and the screens, which becomes the primary reference in a repetitive space with no or very few visual connections with the exterior (Hangzhou East station’s hall in Illustration 8, right).
37 From a phenomenological point of view, it is essential to include here a reflection about time, connecting the perception of the waiting space and the idea of subjective time. As Husserl points out, it is subjective time or time-consciousness, that is the phenomenological datum that provides a temporal character to “objects of perception, memory and expectation” (Husserl, Brough, 2011). There is an interesting connection between the present, past and future perceptions of time (the Husserlian “thickness” of time, as named by Dostal) and the way in which time is perceived in connection with concepts of memory (past) and expectations (future) – or, as Husserl defines them, the retentive and protentive conditions of time, respectively (Dostal, 2006).
38 Memory and expectations are essential components of the phenomenology of the journey that is deployed in the waiting space of the station. During waiting time, passengers are continuously referring to events that are expected to happen in the future, in connection with memories of what has happened in similar situations, in this way keeping expectations and memory in permanent and close relation. The routine of the train schedules, which represents a reference to the consolidated past, is supported by the will to cover the passengers’ expectations about the journey, all reflected in the light of the information screens. Memory and expectations are two concepts that are also connected to the idea of modernity. The dismissal of memory and an overestimation of expectancies for the future are two common characteristics found in the diversity of the modernity theory.
39 The denial of history has happened in a similar way in the East and the West, with different origins and consequences. In the West, modernity was induced in society as a consequence of the technical evolution deployed since the Industrial Revolution: technological progress changed living conditions and the built environment in a way that made people feel optimistic about a more exciting future world. In the East, more specifically in China, the technological progress was a top-down mandate that had terrible consequences for the population in a technologically underdeveloped society. The Great Famine marked a whole generation that acknowledged these dramatic facts as part of the failure of modernity. If the dismissal of memory was based on technological optimism in the West, in China there was a political demand grounded in
Ambiances , Varia 16
the denial of the old regime, but in both cases, the perception of time lost the aforementioned “thickness” with the exclusion of its past side, the side of the memory.
40 It is important to also mention at this point that Western and Eastern ideas of time are conceptually very different. As Klein points out, the more Western linear understanding of time was not fully alien to the East (which, for instance, records genealogy in a linear way), but in China the most predominant historiographic reading was cyclical (2014, p.289-290). The change in this mode of time perception in China is also connected to the particularities of its modernity, affected by “the confrontation with imperialism and the experience of dynastic decline” that shunted the Chinese time perception to a more linear, or Western, understanding, formalized through the adoption of the Gregorian calendar as one of the first measures of the Republican government in 1912 (p. 290).
Illustration 8: Children playing with ice blocks inside Suzhou station, 2018 (left); the interior of Hangzhou East railway station (right)
Source and Copyright: the authors
41 The transition to the platforms is preceded by an automatic checking process and the subsequent human queue. On their way out, desperate smokers start to light their cigarettes, and the arrival at the platforms is shrouded by the combined smell of humans and tobacco, just at the moment when the futuristic beauty of the high-speed trains appears in front of our eyes. With the change of the vast hall space to the linear space of the platforms, time perception also shifts from the thick waiting time to a lighter one where expectancies take over, in a fully protentive experience . The passengers are ready to depart.
Ambiances , Varia 17
Illustration 9: Fuxing Hao ready for departure (left); a man smoking at the platform of Xi’an station (right)
Source and Copyright: the authors
The Journey
42 Nicholas Daly argues that the railway must be understood as more than a simple mode of transport: for the Victorians, it stood as both agent and icon of the acceleration of the pace of everyday life; it annihilated an older experience of time and space and made new demands on the sensorium of the traveller (Daly, 1999). Since the 1950s, scholars have been exploring the way in which the perception and body sensations change when people experience the environment from a moving vehicle. As Gibson points out, perception in movement produces a blurry foreground and an outline of the background, both effects that are especially important in a transportation mode, where “visual stimulation becomes proportionally more important than the bodily stimulation” (Gibson, 1977, p. 135). In such a rapid movement as that produced by the high-speed train, prehension – as the anticipation of the body’s sensorial experiences – is almost impossible, hence the passengers participate in an experience where the understanding of the physical environment remains unexpanded and the judgement of size and the dimensions of the outside space becomes impossible (Sennett, 2019, p. 178). At the same time, the lack of frontal vision in the train experience – or, more specifically, the disconnection between the frontal perception of the carriage’s television screens (or passengers’ screens) and the reality of the lateral views of the landscape framed by the windows – renders the immersive perception of space impossible. The outside appears to the passengers to be as flat as the screen that they have in front of them and, without the complementarity between frontal and lateral perception, the bodies of the passengers become detached from the space that they are moving through. As Sennett explains, this complementarity is essential in the distinction between place – a site in which you are or dwell – and just space, as a more generic site that you move through (Ibid., p. 185). All these perceptual phenomena are exacerbated by the increase of speed, creating a new way of viewing (“part human and part machine” as Schwarzer suggests, 2004, p. 32), where the difference in experience between travelling in the new high-speed modes and the old low-speed modes is enormous.
43 This feeling of obliteration of the old and the challenge represented by the new is also represented in the travellers. With the rise of the middle class in China, middle-aged Chinese people who have grown up in a completely different context (in the failures of
Ambiances , Varia 18
modernity mentioned before) have access to the new transportation mode. The urban population in China has been growing at a rate of 20 million per year (from 1996 until now, and probably for the next 20 years), mainly nurtured by the rural exodus (Chen, 2013, p. 5); and it is these same rural people that are some of the primary users of train services in China and, progressively more, also users of the high-speed services.
44 This factor is also responsible for the unusual social life that can be found in the train cars, emitting a feeling of a kind of domesticity that comes from the same origin as the railways’ journeys in China. In the travel book Riding the Iron Rooster, Paul Theroux writes about a passenger on a train from Harbin to Dalian in the 1980s: “few people in the train looked out of the window. They were eating noodles out of tin cups, guzzling tea, shouting or sleeping. Many were taking advantage of the recent relaxation of the rules governing card games. They were actually gambling in Hard Glass, and some groups were playing mah-jongg” (Theroux, 1988, p. 320). This familiarity is rooted in a rural way of living, where people extend their domestic customs into the public space – used to a more blurred boundary between the two – and it was magisterially recorded in a series of pictures produced by the photographer Fuchun Wang from 1978 until today. In these pictures, it can be seen that families, couples and friends are acting in the public space of the train car as if it were their own home, with a total abstraction of the presence of others and the movement of the train. Observing the image, it can be argued that the rural familiarity of the train’s users brings back a feeling of togetherness in the interior of the train carriage that balances the disconnection between the interior space and the outside space through which we are travelling.
Illustration 10: Sketches of the social interactions that happen in the train carriage as photographed by Fuchun Wang
Source: Fuchung Wang’s Photographs Copyright: the authors
45 Answering a question about the relationship between phenomenology and real-life, art critic Hal Foster said in an interview in 2009: “phenomenology is of most interest to people when the life-world seems most mediated when almost everything seems given over to the image” (Foster, 2010, p. 137). The photographs from Wang connect the mediated world and the real world through the reflection of everyday life in the train. As Schwarzer also reminds us, “seeing the world from a train is like seeing it from a moving village” (Schwarzer, 2004, p. 47).
46 Scholars have compared the experience of the train journey with a moving image; as with any moving image, it is susceptible to a double-sided reading. On the one hand, as
Ambiances , Varia 19
individual images, the train offers a patchwork of places and landscapes that are combined unpredictably with the observations of the people and events evolving in the carriages. As Mitchell Schwarzer points out, in movement, the passengers experience architecture and landscapes “within a technologically expanded visual field” that results in a perception where objects are not placed in continuous space anymore but show as “variable assemblages in intermittent space” (Ibid., p. 21). This phenomenon promotes an incohesive experience, which is a photographic reading of the journey. As Schwarzer reminds us, resuming his experience in documenting architectural landscapes from the train, the car and the aeroplane: “seen in motion, houses and whole cities roll, break apart, and recombine… Seen within frames, architecture is experienced as graphic and pictorial.” (Ibid., p. 12). As Paul Virilio explains, the reconfiguration of images related to the movement has a ludic component deeply connected with our childhood (1988, p. 11), and it is this reconfiguration that the train promotes through the overlapping of events that happens at different speeds in the two different worlds – the carriage and the outside. The necessity of a particular assemblage of space and events is joyful and it is complemented by a certain idea of risk from the moment at which, as Schwarzer says, we are “travelling beyond the capacities of our bodies” (2004, p. 22), in a “new way of viewing, part human and part machine” (p. 32).
47 On the other hand, it is inevitable that a more cohesive reading of the images should be received, in a sequence that can be termed a cinematographic reading of reality. As Patrick Keiller states in The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes, “Both cinema and the railway offer more or less predetermined and repeatable spatio-temporal continuities.” (Keiller, 2014, p. 160). The necessity of this continuity – as an extension of people’s daily life routines – causes people to make connections between the images and frame them in a wider and more cohesive narrative. Looking to the inside, passengers are constantly receiving subtle information from visible details in order to invent narratives able to provide a cohesive understanding of what happens. Looking outside, the fragments of the landscape are also imaginatively recomposed: passengers try to permanently map their position in the territory in pursuing an understanding of where they are. As Antonio Damasio states, “the distinctive feature of brains such as the one we own is their uncanny ability to create maps… Maps are constructed when we interact with objects, such as a person, a machine, a place, from the outside of the brain towards its interior.” (Damasio, 2012, p. 67). It is because of this necessity of mental mapping that the high-speed train experience becomes more problematic, provoking a series of spatial distortions that will shortly be explained, namely the “tunnel”, the “one-city”, the “old-but-new” and the “in-translation” effects.
48 The “tunnel effect”, as described by Tang et al. (Tang, Savy, Doulet, 2011) is due to the fact that railway companies need to reduce the number of stops in order to retain the effectiveness of the high-speed travel, and these stops are essential for the mental mapping of the journey. With very few stations in between the lines, and with a considerable cutback in the duration of the journey, it is difficult to compose a mental map, so the passengers are in an undefined condition of in-betweenness. The passengers can place themselves in time, but cannot equally do it in space, provoking a disconnection between these two entities that challenges our rational understanding of the journey. At the same time, this fact becomes a topic for territorial controversy: some cities are in favour of the fast connections but the communities in between these
Ambiances , Varia 20
cities suffer the inconvenience of having the rail transit going through them without receiving any benefit from it.
49 Equally problematic is the “one-city effect”, also described by Tang et al. This effect has been created due to the new temporal proximity between some cities that has been facilitated by the new high-speed infrastructure. Some smaller cities in the proximity of big ones are now extremely well connected through the new HSR network, becoming satellite cities or remote neighbourhoods of the main city. Tianjin is a city situated 30 minutes away from Beijing, on a line intensively served from 06:15 to 22:10, and with a departure interval of 15 minutes. In a similar situation is Suzhou, less than half an hour away from Shanghai, with an equally intense connection timetable. In these cases, the megacity absorbs the workforce and talent from the smaller cities, and the smaller cities attract investment and development, creating a confusing identity between both cities and between the people, who are forced to live in a state of permanent commuting. If the tunnel effect does not allow the passengers to place themselves, this effect challenges the understanding of where the individual belongs to, therefore blurring local identities.
50 The “old-but-new effect” is a consequence of the urban strategy deployed through the location of the stations for the new high-speed infrastructure explained before. Used as a way to mitigate urban sprawl, and with the idea of evolving specific areas of the city through a kind of rail-oriented development, this effect is often generated when new stations are provided far away from the old ones, in totally new and underdeveloped areas of the city. In the specific case of the line between Beijing and Shanghai, only five of the 23 stations have been developed in the same location as the old ones (Ibid., p. 417). Most of the new stations were built in new areas of the cities, in places with no recognizable identity. The passengers arrive at a city where they expect to be welcomed by identifiable images of the place, but they find themselves in an unfamiliar location, sometimes desolate and poorly communicated with the older part of the city. This fact challenges the connection between space and memory, totally distorting our mental mapping of the place and leading us to feel ungrounded.
51 Finally, the “in-translation effect” is based on a new model of place created around multimodal transportation hubs. These nodes have become so intense that they are attracting the development of business centres and transportation-related industries around them, creating an identity based on people and goods constantly in translation. For instance, Shanghai Hongqiao connects a few modalities of rail transportation (HSR, intercity railway, maglev and subway) with cars, taxis, buses and trucks, which go in and out through the four highway entrances connected closely with the regional road system. All this is, at the same time, linked to national and international airlines, thanks to the Hongqiao International Airport – in this way becoming a strategic regional hub for the Yangtze River Delta area and other regions (Tang, Savy, Doulet, 2011, p. 418–419). The mapping of this place no longer responds to a feeling of belonging but instead to a fluid condition, defined by a transitory moment in the line that relates where you are coming from with where you are going next. This fluidity challenges the stability of space, which has become temporary and consequently also disputes the concepts of place and identity. In this frame, time has lost its absolute condition, becoming relative as part of a coordinated chain of events that could shift unexpectedly. This effect is the materialization of the liquid modernity (as defined by
Ambiances , Varia 21
Bauman, 2018), resulting in unstable places with no identity, framed by an uncertain time.
52 All these aforementioned situations sometimes collapse in the same travel experience, reframing our experience of the journey in a very particular way. These experiences cannot be understood just from the phenomenological point of view but should be viewed from a wider scope, where personal experiences are interlaced with an inevitable understanding of our context. As the theories of embodied dynamicism that arose in the 1990s state, the mind is an embodied dynamic system in the world or, in other words, the perceiver, the perception and the thing perceived are mutually co- dependent (Varela, Rosch, Thompson, 1992). The experience of the journey, like any other human experience, is in this way conditioned by the necessity of creating meaning (Perez Gomez, 2016, p. 144), because any phenomenological experience unavoidably provokes a symbolic interpretation. In the specific case of the experience of the journey – as a phenomenology in movement – this meaning is created in the context of an atmosphere (stimmung), as explained by Perez Gomez (p. 144), which means that whatever is experienced in the journey is connected to the movements of our body and, specifically in the case of the journey, also to our body in movement, creating an indissoluble connection between perception and emotion. It is interesting to point out here that, despite the etymological reading of “emotion” as “out of motion”, movement is one of the more frequent sources of emotions because these emotions are, differently to feelings, connected to body movements (from facial to visceral), as Damasio explains (2012, p. 116–118).
53 Despite the previous classifications of the reading of the journey experience (referred to as photographic and cinematographic, frame and sequence, or disconnected and connected), the brain has, as Frank Wilson explains, an inscrutable way of processing both “sequential and simultaneous operations” (1999, p. 302–307) without prioritizing one specific reading. It is this complexity that makes the experience of the journey so appealing, a complexity that is exponentially increased with speed.
Illustration 11: A view of high-rise buildings under construction from the window of an HSR train in China (left); a man looking outside the window in a high-speed train in China, 2018 (right)
Source and Copyright: the authors
Ambiances , Varia 22
The Arrival
54 Richard Lucae describes the different effects that the train station’s hall has on departing and arriving passengers. Lucae states that the space of the station’s hall “with one of its sides wide open to the world, may, by contrast with the closed buildings of the city, create an unpleasant or perhaps even frightening impression. But to one who arrives from outside, the gigantic hall with its solid stone enclosure and its wide-spreading protective roof, may, despite the enormous dimensions, seem positively cosy after the limitless space through which the train wheels have been carrying him for miles and miles.” (Lucae, 1869).
55 These perceptions of spatial difference between the architecture of the tracks and that of the city correspond to a more Western typology station, where the two sides are not only extremely different (in terms of space, materiality and technology) but are also nearby each other. The situation in the Chinese stations, specifically in the new stations developed for the high-speed lines, is different for several reasons. Firstly, the proximity between the space of the platforms connected to the rail tracks and the space of the station hall connected to the city is unclear. This is because the transition to the outside is usually along a new path, disconnected from the departing space of the hall. This is due to the controlled entry, which needs a separation between in and out routes – in a similar way to what happens in an airport. The arrival is usually through an unrecognizable space that is not related to the space that has been left behind, bringing back the spatial distortions as discussed before. Secondly, differently from the Western typology of the station, the city becomes invisible from the arrival, an invisibility that is reinforced by the fact that the way out is usually tunnelled, with very few or no connections to the outside. Only after the checking-out process (again, an organized queue and the subsequent registry and control) can the passengers see their way out and get a hint of the city receiving them. The trip has concluded.
Conclusions
56 The authors have explored the connections between the phenomenology of the journey and the modernity approach in China, from the common ground of the “pre- theoretical” situation represented by both. From the singularities in the locations of the stations to the overwhelming monumentality of the public spaces, the beginning of the train journey in China is marked by “tensions within modernity” that, in the Chinese case, are resumed in the dialectical dualities between city and countryside and among the conflict between public and private interests. The particularities of the space of the new HSR stations (its vastness and dissolution) provoke a reading of time connected to concepts like memory and expectation, also related to the understanding of Chinese modernity.
57 Undoubtedly, the experience of railway travel in China has changed dramatically over the last ten years, due especially to the development of the high-speed network. The development of this new infrastructure in China has occurred within the framework of a particular history, where foreign and domestic conditions greatly influenced the approach to modernity. From the colonization attempts to the failure of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, Chinese modernity was, in its origin, a more politically driven phenomenon in a very intense manner, dismissing the necessity of a
Ambiances , Varia 23
more technological approach. Only after Chairman Mao’s death was China able to focus on the development of the high-speed train infrastructure, but the development was affected by the peculiarities of Chinese history, influencing the phenomenology of the journey in the present day.
58 Two different paths could be considered for continuing this research. The first could be based on historical research into understanding the conditions of the train network development before the high-speed era. This research is significant for the understanding of the peculiarities of the Chinese approach to modernity. The second line of further development of this research could be based on the detailed analysis of the particular conditions in which different high-speed train stations have been developed. Within the general framework discussed in this paper, the differences between the plan and development of the different stations would allow us a more comprehensive understanding of how the distinct conditions play in the specificities of the Chinese social and political context.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aldama, Zigor. 03/02/2020. La fabrica donde se construyen los misiles chinos... sobre railes, El Pais, Retina, [online]. Available online at: https://retina.elpais.com/retina/2020/01/31/ innovacion/1580469305_291157.html (consulted on April 5, 2020).
Barbara, Anna; Perliss, Anthony. 2006. Invisible Architecture: Experiencing Places through the Sense of Smell. Milano: Skira.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2018. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Beaumont, Matthew & Freeman, Michael J. 2007. The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble. Bern: P. Lang.
Chen, Chia-Lin & Wei, Biao. 2013. High-Speed and Urban Transformation in China: The Case of Hangzhou East Rail Station. Built Environment, vol 39, no. 3, p. 385–398.
Chen, Zhen. 2013. Railway station and urban transition in China. Planum, The Journal of Urbanism, n. 27, vol. 2 [online]. Available online at: http://www.planum.bedita.net/download/ _nul_conference_proceedings-chen_session_2-pdf (consulted on April 5, 2020).
Daly, Nicholas. 1999. Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses. ELH - BALTIMORE- vol 66, no. 2: p. 461–488.
Damasio, Antonio. 2012. Self Comes to Mind. Constructing the Conscious Brain. New York: Vintage Books.
Dostal, Robert J. 1993. Time and phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. In: Guignon, Charles B. (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 141– 169.
Ford, Larry R. 2008. World Cities and Global Change: Observations on Monumentality in Urban Design. Eurasian Geography and Economics, vol 49, no. 3: p. 237–262.
Ambiances , Varia 24
Foster, Hal. 2010. New Monumentality: Architecture and Public Space. Perspecta, vol 42, p. 135-139.
Foucault, Michel. 1991. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by A. Sheridan, London. New York: Penguin.
Gibson, James Jerome. 1997. The perception of the visual world. Westport: Greenwood Press.
Giedion, Sigfried, Sert, Jose Luis, & Léger, Fernand. 1943. Nine Points on Monumentality. In: Giedion, S., Architecture, You and Me, Diary of a Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. p. 48-51.
Haixiao, Pan & Ya, Gao. 2019. Development of High-Speed Rail in the People’s Republic of China. ADBI Working Paper 959. Tokyo: Asian Development Bank Institute. Available on line at: https:// www.adb.org/publications/development-high-speed-rail-prc (consulted on April 5, 2020).
Hornsby, Adrian. 2009. Tiananmen Square: the history of the world’s largest paved square. The Architectural Review, [online]. Available online at: https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/ tiananmen-square-the-history-of-the-worlds-largest-paved-square/8691533.article (consulted on April 5, 2020).
Huang, Yaping; Lu, Shiwei; Yang, Yiping and Zhao, Zhiyuan. 2018. Exploring Railway Network Dynamics in China from 2008 to 2017. International Journal of Geo-Information, vol 7, no. 320 [online]. Available on line at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/ 326917113_Exploring_Railway_Network_Dynamics_in_China_from_2008_to_2017 (consulted on April 5, 2020).
Husserl, Edmund, & Brough, John Barnett. 2011. On the phenomenology of the consciousness of internal time (1893–1917). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publ.
Jian, Zhen (Ed.), 2019. A study of the 13th Five-Year Plan for the development and planning of railway road. Beijing: China Railway Publishing House [original in Chinese].
Keiller, Patrick. 2014. The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes. London: Verso.
Klein, Thoralf. 2014. How Modern was Chinese Modernity? Exploring Tensions of a Contested Master Narrative. International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, HCM, vol 2, no. 3: p. 275– 301.
Köll, Elisabeth. 2019. Railroads and the Transformation of China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lin, George C. S. 1997. Red Capitalism in South China: Growth and Development of the Pearl River Delta. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Lucae, Richard. 1869. Uber Die Macht Des Raumes in Der Baukunst. Zeitschrift für Bauwesen, no. 19, p. 294-306.
Mildenberg, Ariane. 2017. Modernism and Phenomenology: Literature, Philosophy, Art. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Parks, Tim. 2014. Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo. London: Vintage.
Pérez Gómez, Alberto. 2016. Attunement: architectural meaning after the crisis of modern science. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Proust, Marcel. 1981. Remembrance of Things Past, New York: Random House.
Ambiances , Varia 25
Quian, Zhu. 2014. China’s pre-reform urban transformation: the case of Hangzhou during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). International Development Planning Review, vol 36, no. 2, p. 181– 203.
Rowe, Peter G., & Kuan, Seng. 2002. Architectural Encounters with Essence and Form in Modern China. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1977. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Urizen Books.
Schwarzer, Mitchell. 2004. Zoomscape: Architecture in Motion and Media. New York: Princeton University Press.
Sennett, Richard. 2019. Building and dwelling: ethics for the city. London: Penguin Books.
Smith, Christopher J. 2008. Monumentality in Urban Design: The Case of China. Eurasian Geography and Economics, vol 49, no. 3, p. 263–279.
Tang, Frank. 03/01/2019. Full Speed Ahead for China’s High-Speed Rail Network in 2019 in Bid to Boost Slowing Economy. South China Morning Post, [online]. Available on line at: https:// www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/2180562/full-speed-ahead-chinas-high-speed- rail-network-2019-bid-boost (consulted on April 5, 2020).
Tang, Shuangshuang; Savy, Michel; & Doulet, Jean-Francois. 2011. High speed rail in China and its potential impacts on urban and regional development. Local Economy, vol 26, no 5, p. 409-422. Available online at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/ 227574865_High_Speed_Rail_in_China_and_its_Potential_Impacts_on_Urban_and_Regional_Development (consulted on April 5, 2020).
Theroux, Paul. 1988. Riding the Iron Rooster. New York: Ivy Books.
Varela, Francisco J.; Rosch, Eleanor & Thompson, Evan. 1992. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Virilio, Paul. 1988. Estética de la Desaparición. Barcelona: Anagrama.
Wang, Xiong. 2016. China Speed: Development of China's High-Speed Rail. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.
Wilson, Frank. 1999. The Hand: how its use shapes the brain, language, and human culture. New York: Vintage.
Zhu, Jianfei. 2009. Architecture of Modern China. A historical critique. London: Routledge.
ABSTRACTS
Hosting more than two-thirds of the global high-speed train network, and growing at an unprecedented rate, China has become an interesting location for studying this infrastructure. In this paper, the authors begin by introducing some particularities related to the high-speed travel experience, in order to provide a general understanding of how it affects people’s perceptions of time and space. This is followed by an explanation of some peculiarities that have defined the Chinese case as unique. Grounded on theories that assert the interlaced connection between modernity and phenomenology, in this paper the authors explore the connection between the conditions that defined modernity in China and the phenomenology of travel using high-speed trains. The problematic initial approach to Chinese modernity – through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution – impacted later decisions regarding the new infrastructure,
Ambiances , Varia 26
rendering high-speed train journeys in China unique. After the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, when China recovered a sense of normality and togetherness, modernity was globally staged out. Two years later, China commenced the development of its high-speed rail (HSR) network and the beginning of the reform era, as part of its statements of a reframed modernity. This paper explores how the singularities of the Chinese modernity have affected the development of the High-speed train network, defining a particular phenomenology of the trip.
Accueillant plus de deux tiers du réseau mondial de trains à grande vitesse et enregistrant une croissance inédite, la Chine est devenue une zone d’intérêt pour étudier son infrastructure. Dans cet article, les auteurs présenteront tout d’abord certaines spécificités liées à l’expérience du voyage à grande vitesse afin de fournir une vision d’ensemble de la façon dont les perceptions du temps et de l’espace sont influencées. Ensuite, ils expliqueront les éléments qui font de la Chine un cas unique. Se basant sur des théories qui soutiennent le lien entre modernité et phénoménologie, les auteurs explorent dans cet article la relation entre les conditions qui ont défini la modernité en Chine et la phénoménologie du voyage à bord de trains à grande vitesse. L’approche initiale problématique relative à la modernité chinoise, avec le Grand Bond en avant et la Révolution culturelle, a influencé les décisions ultérieures en termes de nouvelles infrastructures, faisant des trajets en trains à grande vitesse en Chine une expérience unique. À la fin de la Révolution culturelle en 1976, la Chine avait retrouvé une sorte de normalité et d’unité, et la mordernité recula de façon générale. Deux ans plus tard, la Chine commença le développement de son réseau de lignes à grande vitesse (LGV). C’est le début d’une ère de réformes, participant aux annonces d’une modernité redéfinie. Cet article explore la façon dont les singularités de la modernité chinoise ont influencé le développement du réseau de train à grande vitesse, définissant ainsi une phénoménologie particulière du voyage.
INDEX
Keywords: China, high-speed train network, modernity, phenomenology Mots-clés: Chine, réseau de trains à grande vitesse, modernité, phénoménologie
AUTHORS
JUNJIE XI Junjie Xi is a lecturer in architectural design and humanities at the University of Liverpool. She worked as a Postdoctoral researcher for the China Railway Group Limited and School of Architecture, Tsinghua University from 2016 to 2018. Her project “The Use of Flexible Architecture and Structures in the Design of Public Buildings” was funded by China Railway and the research outputs will be used by this state-owned enterprise in their construction work in the future. She published her book Small-Scale Public Transportable and Pre-Fabricated Buildings: Evaluating their Functional Performance in March 2018. She is currently writing a new book China’s High-Speed Railway Transformation: Infrastructure Investment and Urban Development.
PACO MEJIAS VILLATORO Paco Mejias Villatoro is a registered architect in Spain and the UK, and he holds a PhD in Architectural Theory and Design from the Madrid Polytechnic University. He has been teaching Architecture since 1997, in Spain, Canada, the United States and China. As a practitioner, he worked for Zaha Hadid Office in London, before opening his firm in Spain. He has been awarded
Ambiances , Varia 27
in several competitions and nominated for the prestigious Mies van der Rohe Prize. He is nowadays co-director of Estudio Abierto/Open Studio, a collaborative think-and-do tank, operating at the intersection between architecture and urbanism (https:// www.thisstudioisopen.org/).
Ambiances , Varia 28
Immersivity: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Spaces of Immersion Immersivité : Une approche interdisciplinaire aux espaces d’immersion
Florian Freitag, Céline Molter, Laura Katharina Mücke, Helena Rapp, Damien B. Schlarb, Elisabeth Sommerlad, Clemens Spahr and Dominic Zerhoch
Introduction1
1 On a drizzly December morning, we – two scholars in American Studies, two human geographers, one film scholar, one anthropologist, and one scholar in theatre studies – are standing in the middle of the maritime “Harbor Christmas Market” on the banks of the Rhine in Cologne. Between sparsely frequented Christmas booths with nautical decorations, we discuss our impressions of the venue’s atmosphere and overall immersive potential. Christmas markets are more or less gated themed spaces. For central Europeans, these markets are familiar enough as a setting, yet unfamiliar enough to experience them as a break from the ordinary. However, virtually all of us noticed that the market’s various atmospheres jarred with the holiday cheer that the market setting ostensibly tried to evoke. Having brought distinct disciplinary approaches and tools to the situation, we walked away realizing that they were not too helpful to analytically tackle our experience. Immersion remained as elusive as atmospheres.
2 However, by drawing on their shared spatial qualities, we may use the former experience to get closer to the latter. Spatiality is one of the ways in which atmospheres shape our perception. Hence, understanding atmospheres requires that we first understand their spatial qualities. Attending to designed spaces such as Christmas markets, we argue, can help us in this endeavor: on the one hand, spatiality is an inherent feature of human perception. In this sense, we are bound by spaces. On the other hand, designed or produced spaces have the distinct advantage of allowing us to impose and trace tangible limits on our atmospheric perception, thus potentially
Ambiances , Varia 29
opening up at least one aspect of atmospheres to analysis. Understanding atmospheres by way of spaces thus necessitates, among other things, that we comprehend the immersive potential of designed spaces. This is what we want to call immersivity, and it is in this sense that immersivity can help us understand atmospheres.
3 In fact, what our various disciplinary approaches did allow us to do was discuss those aspects of the market that theoretically should have produced immersion. When we reflect on our individual responses, the question whether spatial and medial tools and strategies for producing immersion – or what we will here call immersivity – can be defined across disciplines moves into focus. Discussing these issues particularly becomes viable in an interdisciplinary discourse that takes seriously the purchase afforded by existing disciplinary traditions and challenges the limitations of those traditions in a collaborative exchange.
4 The term “immersion” figures in multiple academic discourses yet remains conceptually, terminologically, and methodologically fuzzy. Depending on the context, immersion may designate either a specific state of mind or a set of properties, found in either objects or practices, that contributes to generating such a state of mind. Researchers have thus developed subject- and object-oriented approaches to immersion. Adding to this conceptual confusion is a linguistic one. Immersion may take on any number of metaphorical permutations, for instance by designating feelings of submersion (in water), sensory overload, as well as the notion of being involved (sometimes: being lost) in an activity or story. Some definitions of the term even encompass both the prerequisites as well as the effects of immersion. Even when we reduce the debate to the two mainline arguments (immersion as subjective phenomenon vs. immersion as objective property), we are still left with the problem of articulating the relationship between these two standpoints. As with many theoretical terms, the linguistic gestures around the term immersion matter because they shape the methodology necessary for studying the phenomenon. What we would like to suggest in this article is, on the one hand, a clear differentiation between the two approaches to the phenomenon, and, on the other hand, a precise terminological instrumentarium that reflects this differentiation.
5 More precisely, we argue that immersivity is (1) a distinct term that denotes (2) an inherent quality of objects in general and of mediated, and thus delineated, real and imagined spaces in particular. (3) Building on Wolf’s intersectional model (see fig. 1), we assume that those spatial qualities and modes interact in particular ways to generate immersion. These constellations are dynamic and context-sensitive, i.e. they depend on the spaces in question and their attendant topological imaginaries. Elucidating these interactions requires discussing examples from different disciplinary contexts. (4) And it is precisely through this interdisciplinary approach that we take a first step towards understanding immersivity. We do not seek to present a unified theory and methodology of immersivity but rather to pinpoint cross-disciplinary congruences wherever possible. The following considerations may nevertheless lead, in the long run, to a transdisciplinary, qualitative, experimental, and analytical model. Following a theoretical introduction to the topic of immersion, we will first conceptualize our interdisciplinary understanding of immersion and immersivity and then launch into a transdisciplinary dialogue about examples of immersive spaces from theme parks and film to theatre and educational spaces.
Ambiances , Varia 30
Conceptualizing Immersion and Immersivity
6 Derived from Latin immergo (to plunge, dip, or sink into liquid), the English term “immersion” is still used literally, e.g. in the context of sacral rites and liturgy for the administration of Christian baptism. In what has become one of the most frequently cited statements on immersion, Janet Murray, in Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997), draws on this literal meaning, when she notes that we “seek the same feeling from a psychologically immersive experience that we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool: the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air, that takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus” (Murray, 1997, p. 98‑99).
7 Murray employs the adjective “immersive” metaphorically to argue that what those who engage in such experiences desire are affective shifts in their consciousness. Many have followed in her footsteps, using “immersion” interchangeably with such concepts as “engagement” (Bentham, 1871), “presence” (Minsky, 1980), “flow” (Csíkszentmihályi, 1990), “involvement” (Calleja, 2007; Neitzel, 2008), “incorporation” (Calleja, 2011), “absorption” (Wolf, 2012), or “aesthetic illusion” (Wolf, 2013). For instance, in Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, Oliver Grau, referring to the visual arts, speaks of “a high-grade feeling of immersion, of presence” (Grau, 2003, p. 7). Werner Wolf, in “Aesthetic Illusion”, likewise defines immersion as “an experiential, predominantly emotional diving into a represented world” (Wolf, 2013, p. 23) and identifies aesthetic illusion as “predominantly a state of imaginary immersion” (p. 16).
8 Marie-Laure Ryan reiterates the slipperiness of immersion as a conceptual footing in Narrative as Virtual Reality 2, pointing out that the term has been discussed “from both a technological and a phenomenological point of view” (Ryan, 2015, p. 9). In particular the adjective “immersive” has been used in both subject-centered, reception-oriented, or – in Ryan’s terms – phenomenological approaches as well as in object-centered, production-oriented, or technological studies, where it denotes the potential of a particular setup to induce an experience of immersion. Ryan sees Grau’s “high-grade feeling of immersion, of presence” as the result of “immersive image spaces,” engendered by media such as the fresco room, the panorama, or the circular cinema that address the eye “with a totality of images” (ibid., p. 5; our emphasis). In the same context, video game designers Katie Salen and Eric & Heather Zimmerman caution against what they called “immersive fallacy,” the notion that games isolate players from the natural and social world to achieve immersion (Salen/Zimmerman, 2003, p. 450 and f.). Wolf speaks in a similar constructivist vein of “immersive architecture” (Wolf, 2013, p. 15; our emphasis), while Ryan insinuates that it is really the acceleration of images that allows media to engender immersion, for in “contemporary culture, moving pictures are the most immersive of all media” (Ryan, 2015, p. 85; our emphasis). While Grau, Wolf, and Ryan differentiate between the two conceptual approaches to immersion, they all agree that immersive objects, media, and art forms engender experiences or feelings.
9 Other scholars have also tried to distinguish terminologically between a subject- centered, reception-oriented, phenomenological approach and an object-centered, production-oriented, technological one. In Understanding Virtual Reality, for instance, William Sherman and Alain Craig suggest using “mental immersion” for the “state of being deeply engaged; suspension of disbelief; involvement” and “physical immersion”
Ambiances , Varia 31
for the “property of a VR system that replaces or augments the stimuli to the participant’s senses” (Craig, Sherman, 2018, p. 10). In “Film in Depth” film scholar Adriano D’Aloia speaks of a “sense of immersion” or “experiences of immersion” (D’Aloia, 2012, p. 95) and differentiates those from “immersivity,” the “technical means and special effects” necessary for conveying “the impression of really being in the space of the fictional events depicted and an intense sensorial experience” (p. 89). Immersivity here suggests a special quality that dwells within the means of engendering immersion. D’Aloia seems to agree with Maurizio Forte, who similarly identifies “immersivity” as a gradable property of VR systems, noting that the “level of immersivity determines the sense of embodiment and sense of ‘presence’ in the environment” (Forte, 2012, p. 70).
10 D’Aloia and Forte were not the first to use the term “immersivity,” but they used it to distinguish the state of mind from the set of properties of an object. Meanwhile, most scholars have employed “immersivity” synonymously with “immersion,” grammatical sensibilities notwithstanding. Galimberti et al., for instance, speak of “phase(s) of immersion” and “phase(s) of non-immersivity” (Galimberti et al., 2001, p. 143); and Ronchi defines “immersivity” as “the level of sensory and emotional involvement that captures the user and links them to the application” (Ronchi, 2009, p. 160). Confusingly, both immersion and immersivity appear in the literature as referring to both a form of reception — a state of mind — and a quality found in objects or activities.
11 This is where we would like to intervene. To escape the conceptual and terminological quagmires that surround immersion, we propose following D’Aloia and Forte and differentiating between immersion as a state of mind and immersivity as an object’s ability of fostering immersion. Immersivity, then, designates a process of production, whereas immersion is a process of reception. Differentiating these terms allows us to pivot the analysis to the production side. i.e. towards the inherent properties of clearly delineated objects rather than speculating about mental states or even about the relation between immersion and immersivity.
12 For if we posit that “immersion” and what we now call “immersivity” are distinct phenomena, their relationship becomes key. Are they mutually constitutive or two ends of a causal chain? There is reason for doubt on whether immersivity and immersion are bound in as direct a correlation, for instance, Forte and others would have it. Grau is one of very few scholars who subscribe to a mechanical, deterministic conception of the relationship between immersivity and immersion, where the presence of certain medial features – in Grau’s case, “360˚ images” (Grau, 2003, p. 5) – automatically “produc[es] the most intensive feelings of immersion possible” (p. 15). This lines up with behavioral social psychology approaches which address immersion by discussing the concept of priming.2 Wolf, by contrast, allows various other factors to play a role as well, arguing that “like all reception effects,” aesthetic illusion (or immersion) is “elicited by the conjunction of factors that are located (a) in the representations themselves, which tend to show certain characteristic features and follow certain illusion-generating principles, (b) in the reception process and the recipients, as well as (c) in framing contexts, e.g. cultural-historical, situational, or generic ones” (Wolf, 2013, p. 52).
13 In fact, most scholars have conceived what we here call immersivity as merely one in an entire array of factors that, taken together, induce immersion or an immersed state of mind. This array also includes “the willingness to ignore [those elements] that might
Ambiances , Varia 32
destroy the illusion of another reality” (Lonsway, 2009, p. 125; lyrical poet Samuel Coleridge’s famous “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment” (Coleridge, 1817, p. 52)). Scholars such as Saler (2012) even argue that this process of actively ignoring the limits of illusion needs to be consciously reflected upon in the subject’s mind for immersion to occur.
Figure 1: Wolf’s Factors of Aesthetic Illusion
(Source: Wolf, 2013, p. 52, copyright: the authors)
14 These entanglements and caveats have profound implications for the methodology necessary to study immersivity (and immersion): we cannot simply measure immersion by “counting the number of the users’ senses that are provided with input and the degree to which inputs from the physical environment are ‘shut out’” (Lombard/ Ditton, 1997), as Matthew Lombard and Theresa Ditton have suggested. However, by the same token, counting the number of senses addressed and the extent to which input from the physical environment is “shut out” is precisely what the “measuring” of immersivity would entail. Such measurements appear more feasible, when they are conducted on the production side of the immersive equation and tied to the specific spatial configurations that are supposed to immerse a subject.
15 Hence, we use immersivity as a means for comprehending immersive spaces. Doing so allows us to focus on the much more readily available data and properties found in objects and processes that may (or may not) inspire immersion, properties, such as their multi-sensoriality or their strategies of keeping the “real world” at bay. Immersive spaces like theme parks, theatre, films, video games, or learning environments constitute materially and socially constructed territories that are offset from the everyday world by a threshold and governed by a limited number of rigorous and easily discernible rules concerning their sensoriality. It seems to us that any
Ambiances , Varia 33
minimal definition of immersivity has to begin with acknowledging this threshold and lead into a discussion of a particular object’s or set-up’s spatiality.
16 The case of immersive spaces also illustrates the need for an interdisciplinary methodology. Immersivity dwells in a variety of objects and processes that may contribute to engendering immersion. Accordingly, the case studies we will discuss in the following are organized as an interdisciplinary dialogue designed to fathom the potential and limits of immersivity as a theoretical concept. While all of the contributors share an interest in theorizing and elucidating the shift from immersion to immersivity, and from experience to space, they also acknowledge their own disciplinary histories and traditions. The following discussion thus gathers contributions from cultural geography, film studies, cultural studies, literary studies, and anthropology, with the particular disciplinary traditions linked to these fields productively inflecting the individual contributions to this discussion.
Immersivity in Theme Parks: A Cultural Studies Perspective
17 In taglines and advertisements, theme parks frequently promise to take visitors to faraway, past, or even fictional places. The “Urlaub in Europa” (“holiday in Europe”) campaign of Europa-Park (Rust, Germany), which in summer 2020 invited visitors to (imaginatively) travel to the various European countries the park’s individual sections are themed to when (actual) travel was restricted due to the COVID-19 pandemic, is a case in point, as is the famous plaque at the entrance to Disneyland (Anaheim, California), which matter-of-factly tells visitors that “Here You Leave Today and Enter the World of Yesterday, Tomorrow and Fantasy.” Offering to immerse visitors in these worlds, theme parks thus take part in the “cultural topos” of the “quest for immersivity” (Huhtamo, 1995, p. 260) and simultaneously constitute a prime example of what Pine and Gilmore (1999) have termed the “experience economy”. Of course, theme parks cannot guarantee that visitors will experience immersion. What they actually offer – and this is our point – is immersivity, in the shape of multisensory environments that blend architecture, landscaping, music, performance, language, and other media and that are carefully separated from the outside world (as well as from each other) through visual barriers (as tall buildings or landscaped berms; see e.g. Carlà and Freitag, 2015, p. 246; Reijnders and Waysdorf, 2018, p. 180). However, as the following example from Phantasialand (Brühl, Germany) will illustrate, the immersivity of theme parks also frequently includes three-dimensional depictions of the very process of immersion that theme park environments seek to elicit within patrons.
18 The first thing visitors see when they enter Phantasialand, opened in 1967 and one of Germany’s most successful theme parks (see Rubin, 2019, p. 59), is an impressive vista of the park’s “Berlin” section – a boulevard lined with shops, restaurants, and attractions that is modeled architecturally on the “Unter den Linden” boulevard in the German capital and functionally on “Main Street” at Disneyland in Anaheim, California. One of the reasons why the vista is so impressive is that the entrance to the park – the ticket booths and the row of turnstiles – is located on a much higher level than the park itself. Indeed, visitors who have passed the turnstiles and stopped to enjoy the view or take a picture find themselves on a platform or balcony at the level of the second story
Ambiances , Varia 34
of the “Berlin” buildings. In order to actually enter “Berlin” and, hence, the park, visitors first need to go down two flights of stairs.
19 Although no doubt necessitated by the natural lay of the land prior to the construction of the park, this architectural arrangement and the “action” it requires from the visitors play into and enhance the park’s immersivity in several ways: firstly, the low level of the “Berlin” section and its tall buildings ensure visual cohesion by blocking any view of the surrounding structures, including the parking lot across from the entrance, but also the five-story, African-themed “Hotel Matamba” and the tracks of the likewise African-themed “Black Mamba” roller coaster right next door.
20 Secondly, the walk down the stairs into Phantasialand adds yet another step to the ritual dynamics of leaving the “normal” world outside and entering the geographically, temporally, and/or culturally “other” world(s) of the theme park. This ritual usually includes the walk from the parking lot, the purchase of the tickets, and the passing of the turnstiles, although as in Phantasialand, other elements have frequently been added to reinforce a sense of passage: at Terra mítica (Benidorm, Spain), for instance, visitors need to pass through a replica of the entrance to Luxor Temple to get into the first (Egyptian-themed) section; and at Disney’s “Magic Kingdom” parks in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, visitors need to cross a tunnel at the entrance to which they invariably find the aforementioned sign reminding them that “Here You Leave Today and Enter the World of Yesterday, Tomorrow, and Fantasy.”
21 Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the design of the entrance offers an architectural metaphor of immersion – or, more precisely, an architectural adaptation of the metaphor of “diving” or being submerged that is commonly linked with immersion. Indeed, as visitors to Phantasialand walk down the stairs and thus physically “dive into” the world of the park, they are invited to simultaneously submerge themselves mentally into 1920s Berlin and the other themed areas offered in this park (one of them is actually called “Deep in Africa”). Immersivity is marked here, then, not only by a carefully planned visual separation of the immersive space and the surrounding areas as well as an architecturally reinforced ritual dynamics of passage between these two “worlds,” but especially by an arrangement of this passage in such a way that it physically evokes the mental process of immersion that visitors are invited to perform at this point. Whether in Phantasialand (where crossing from one themed area to another often involves climbing and descending stairs and ramps) or in other theme parks (at Disneyland’s “Pirates of the Caribbean,” for example, where visitors plunge down a water slide at the beginning of the ride), this arrangement is certainly one of theme parks’ most obvious signs of their immersive intentions.
Immersivity in Theatre Studies: A Cultural and Spatial Studies Perspective
22 In contrast, the level of immersivity in theatre experiences depends on the interrelations of material, medial, and performative aspects, producing a space which can be more or less immersive. Compared to the other subjects in this article, (immersive) theatre is defined as an experience where production and reception/ perception are inextricably intertwined. Moreover, its basic disposition relies on engaging participants in the process to the degree that “audiences both refashion and co-produce theatre performances. They are part of the means of aesthetic production”
Ambiances , Varia 35
(Alston, 2006, p. 7). While we identify immersivity as preconditioned by a delineation of spaces in other contexts like theme parks, immersive theatre transposes such delineation to audience participation, specifically their movement and presence in space.
23 Immersive projects in German theatre seem to mark a contrary development to Brecht’s (2017) estrangement effect: they aim at affecting their participants instead of addressing the audience cognitively. But immersive strategies have been known throughout German theatre history. The results of early attempts to achieve immersivity remain “visible” even today: in order to reinforce the immersive experience inherent to his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, for instance, Richard Wagner darkens the auditorium to get spectators immersed into the myth space (Fischer-Lichte 2003, 2004). German theatre studies surprisingly only recently adopted the term immersion, whereas Anglo-Saxon academic discourse has known the term, as illustrated by the work of Machon (2013), Alston (2016), and White (2012). The latter, for instance, defines immersive theatre projects as “performances which use installations and expansive environments, which have mobile audiences, and which invite audience participation” (White, 2012, p. 221).
24 The following discussion of SIGNA’s performance of Das Heuvolk (2017) proceeds from an inductive approach to audience participation. The discussion draws on Adam Alston’s reflections on immersive theatre as an experience machine, i.e. a construct of “various cogs and pulleys of performance – scenography, choreography, dramaturgy, and so on – coalesce around a central aim: to place audience members in a thematically cohesive environment” (Alston, 2016, p. 2). SIGNA, a performance group that has prominently shaped the artistic discourse in the German-speaking theatre landscape, claims to cross the “physical boundary between performer and audience” not only architecturally, but in other ways as well. According to their website, performances last up to 250 hours, allowing “the improvisations to develop complex and intricately detailed stories, as well as provide ample time for audience members to acclimate to, and become insinuated in, the machinations of the world being portrayed” (SIGNA.dk).
25 Spatial representation is manifested by its materiality. As in theme parks, architectural means and ritual dynamics are used to differentiate an in- from an outside, with the participants often undergoing a lengthy process of entering: participants in Das Heuvolk are picked up by a sightseeing tour bus and taken to a former US Army base which is situated outside the city and surrounded by fences. Once they have entered, participants can neither leave and come back nor connect to the world outside by mobile devices. Rooms are designed according to the narrative and integrate the site (site-specific/site-sympathetic). Moreover, the designers use visual, acoustic (sound), haptic, olfactory, and even gustatory elements to create a multisensory environment.
26 Materiality thus reinforces mediality; and in-character performers introduce the participants to the ‘world.’ In SIGNA’s Das Heuvolk, the story is about a military priest who founded a cult that believes in an upcoming apocalypse. After the military left, the priest and his followers stayed in the area. The participants are invited to look around for six hours and afterwards decide whether they wish to join the cult. This constitutes the starting point for the dramaturgy, which also depends on the actions of the participants. In this sense, participants are able to create their own dramaturgy (White, 2012, p. 222).
Ambiances , Varia 36
27 Based on the materiality and the information they have received, participants contribute to the success of immersion through their actions. From an analytical point of view, it is therefore useful to focus on the aspect of performativity: while being able to move and act more freely than in a “classical theatre dispositive”, participants of immersive theatre often need to obey specific rules that have been communicated before: these may range from conversations amongst participants and performers to repeatedly doing gestures of greetings when entering different rooms or meeting characters. Participants must perform acts that fit the myth in the given physical space. In the present example, participants act for themselves, while performers embody a character. Offering opportunities for interaction in addition to multisensory environments, immersive theatre experiences cross the line between fiction and reality, an effect that is further reinforced by the experience of duration. SIGNA’s performance thus illustrates how immersive theatre projects can become an experimental space for social behavior that extends beyond the event of an aesthetic experience.
Immersivity in Films: A Film and Media Studies Perspective
28 Comparable to the concurrence of reality and fiction in theater performances, immersivity in film also seems to depend on the co-presence of three layers of reality: to watch a movie implies to oscillate between (1) the filmic space opened up, (2) the architecture of the movie theatre and viewing situation, and (3) the perceived space of being conscious of one’s own perceiving at the same time. Thus, filmic immersivity – from the empathy-evoking and world-building qualities of the diegesis to the established format, size, and two- or three-dimensionality of the represented audiovisuality (Recuber, 2007) – must be located at the intersection of these three conditions. The concept of immersivity can help us map out this in-between space by revealing how these aesthetic, material, and phenomenological dimensions of movie- going constitute the immersive potential of film. Immersivity allows film scholars to recombine these discrete analytical layers to formulate a cohesive picture of how (or if) we become immersed in film.
29 While other immersive attractions like theme parks, Christmas markets, or the bourgeois theater of the 18th century seek to make the outside world vanish completely and to synesthetically locate the subject directly in the immersive architecture, classical motion picture experiences simultaneously unrolls and assembles itself in a virtual/mediated and dark/enclosed room in which film and audience are epistemologically separated. Scholars of film traditionally considered isolation from interferences, which they thought exclusively saw afforded by the theater’s architecture and centering of the viewer’s gaze to the front, a preparational condition for immersion or “indoctrination” (Baudry, 1975). But especially contemporary developments in technology and media culture – most importantly, the migration of moving images from its classical cinema dispositive to mobile or smaller viewing configurations like tablets, smartphones, TVs and distribution networks like streaming platforms – show that an analytical separation of virtuality and “reality” becomes increasingly useless. Additionally, new multiple audio-visual contexts, like digital institutions or exhibition contexts, show that film has left its original place (Hagener,
Ambiances , Varia 37
2011). It seems that in contemporary film and moving images-assemblies immersion does not happen exclusively in a delineated space with clear-cut borders, but is precisely induced through the lack of such a threshold, in other words through the interweaving of the represented and perceiving spaces.
30 Nevertheless, immersivity in moving images, we argue here, is still based on the threefold condition of aesthetic form, context, and viewer dispositions. And understanding filmic immersivity requires that we understand just how these three conditions intersect – and especially post-cinematic contexts can help to identify those intersections. Unfortunately, questions of immersivity in film have so far mainly been developed in relation to produced filmic spaces (Curtis/Voss, 2007; Liptay/Dogramaci, 2016), while film and cultural studies have only recently begun to consider the way these conditions intersect (Mühlhoff, 2018; Breyer/Krasprowicz, 2019) – and in which way the user is formed through this experience. Because the three layers of immersivity form a wide network of intersections, co-effects and plural agencies, concrete propositions can only be made by focusing on individual phenomena.
31 Referring to the three layers of immersivity and the post-cinema context, the work of German sound and video artist Moritz Fehr is crucial. Fehr treats the intersection of film, viewer, and context in working on topics like human interventions in nature by creating reception contexts that interfere with those natural spaces. Especially in his “stereoscopic 3D Film with Ambisonics Surround Sound” Mojave: A Person Was Here (2013), the location of the film is transposed into the Mojave Desert, Las Vegas: the film is shown in a construction trailer [Figure 2]. Through a nearly wall-filling canvas on one wall of the trailer [Figure 3] it connects images and pre-recorded, amplified sounds of fences, wind turbines, and buildings with the conditions that surround the trailer and the viewing situation. The trailer itself, which can be equated with a cinema, becomes the disruptive infrastructure that occupies the mere landscape and causes what then feels like a vibrating soundscape of the desert’s occupation by man.
Ambiances , Varia 38
Figure 2 + 3: Mojave (A Person was here) (2013): Stereoscopic 3D Video Installation by Moritz Fehr
Presented at the Desert Research Station, Center for Land Use Interpretation, 2014-2017 (Copyright: Moritz Fehr)
32 By using 3D-images, Fehr expands the displayed filmic space to encompass the reception space of the viewer, adding sounds from the outside and letting the delineated trailer walls become transparent. This “integration” connects the virtual with the physical space and works as a double filmic immersivity. The film as a physical and cognitively perceivable object thus consciously lacks the threshold that separates it from the formerly non-immersive outside. What Mojave: A Person Was Here elicits, then, is the passage from an enclosed inside to the outside world and the integration of the filmic-aesthetic experience into the perceived experiences of the factual world. This kind of immersivity suggests a plunge back into reality – and an awake and self- conscious mode of immersive reception.
33 Mojave: A Person Was Here describes what film in general is becoming today: a media format integrated into omnipresent processes of media consumption and reception contexts – which, in fact, could also be argued for ‘classical’ movie theatres. The cinema canvas has transformed itself from the metaphor of an open door or window into a membrane (Göttel, 2016) which constantly lets diffuse impulses from in- and outside. The appearance of film in public spaces reverses the rituals of entrance in immersive spaces and constantly annihilates the thresholds, which differentiates it from most of the other immersive spaces depicted in this article.
Ambiances , Varia 39
Immersivity in Video Games: A Cultural and Games Studies Perspective
34 Video games may help us understand immersivity as a medium’s capacity for inducing activity by way of regulating the tension between the virtual world and the social world. Game worlds exist in distinction to players’ everyday experience, yet they are not separate from those experiences. Immersion in games, as Neitzel and Calleja show, depends on players recognizing this difference. David Myers argues that games “restore human behavior to its original lusory state, a state otherwise distorted by social and cultural mores that restrict and distort it” (Myers, 2017, p. 9). However, games also do not mute social experience but call upon players to access their social and cultural experiences and sensibilities and to synthesize gaming actions from those knowledge bases: making a mental map of the game world, recognizing visual cues and environmental story-telling, etc.
35 Firewatch (2016) exemplifies this regulatory function of immersivity in video games, as it draws on various (gendered) American cultural and historical markers to relay its story. The game tells a story of personal crisis and renewal, wrapped up in a murder- mystery plot, through relatively simple object-manipulation mechanics and dialogical role-play. A narrative-driven, first-person action game, Firewatch lets players assume the role of Henry, who spends the summer of 1989 working as a lookout at Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming while trying to escape a tense domestic situation: his wife Julia recently accepted a job as a professor at Yale University, causing them to lead a long-distance relationship. Things take a turn for the worse when Julia gets diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Henry has to come to terms with his own feelings of sexual and intellectual insufficiency and estrangement. The narrative unfolds in the form of conversations via two-way radio between Henry and Delilah, a park ranger and Henry’s supervisor. Using dialog choices that range between “aggressive,” “friendly,” or “cold,” players can nudge their relationship into either professional, friendly, or romantic territory. The game’s central conflict revolves around several mysterious disappearances in the park as well as a mysterious group who monitors Delilah’s and Henry’s conversations. Henry must explore the park to uncover the mystery plot. Narrative and gameplay correlate symbolically here: players engage in all manners of puzzle and way-finding missions. As Henry’s map of the park becomes more and more sophisticated, so does his understanding of Delilah.
36 Confronting these choices forces players to cognize Henry’s personality as something external and malleable, even as they perform chores in the world while locked into a first-person perspective. Firewatch thus balances on what we have called the threshold by demanding players to simultaneously shape, inhabit, and critically analyze their avatar’s behavior.
37 The game furthers these considerations by embedding Henry’s story calls in characteristically U.S.-American cultural archetypes and markers. For instance, players explore Henry’s masculinity and his sense of belonging in the world by navigating him through a seemingly isolated wilderness, a historical American mythological trope, in which nature functions as a liminal space of transgression and regeneration. Retreating to his lonely lookout post in the woods, Henry finds himself on a quest for spiritual renewal. The potential of (sexual) transgression, implied by Delilah’s flirtations, and his violent encounters with the mysterious persons monitoring them all harken back to
Ambiances , Varia 40
what Richard Slotkin calls “regeneration through violence,” a mythology created in and through early American literature (Slotkin, 1973, p. 5). There are moments in which Henry finds “self-renewal or self-creation through acts of violence” (p. 556). Players can also flesh out Henry’s character by collecting various items to create a personal sense of domesticity. The lookout’s bookshelf, for instance, contains noire crime novels by the fictitious author “Richard Sturgeon.” More novels are littered throughout the game world. Most of these items represent a clichéd material history of masculinity – a half-empty whisky bottle, a typewriter – that becomes juxtaposed with Henry’s backstory and personal growth throughout the game.
38 If Henry’s journey is about finding a place in the world, Firewatch is a game about the way we engage video games. Immersivity in games comes from their capacity for confronting dialectically that which is lacking in social experience: the playful mood. That same mood enables us not just to play but to re-engage the social, its culture and history. In Firewatch Henry’s attempts at escaping a difficult domestic situation force him to re-engage issues of individualism, gender, companionship, and community. Video games, in a similar vein, immerse players not by shutting out the world but by engaging social and cultural experiences.
Immersivity in Gamified Educational Spaces: A Socio- Cultural Geographical Perspective
39 From a socio-cultural geographical perspective, we are focusing on immersivity spaces in a gamified educational context. Following the previous example, however, the focus shifts to the interplay between actors and spaces. Referring to the theoretical reflections of this paper, our example SpielRäume illustrates the relevance of “delineated space” in relation to the concept of immersivity. We understand this gamified educational context as an immersivity set-up that can be grasped as an immersive process. Furthermore, this set-up operates as an interaction process between multiple delineated spaces (e.g. landscape park, game, access to the game via the device) and actors (e.g. game producers, players) which is discussed in the following section. In this immersivity set-up, the player can experience immersive moments, which — in our example — should encourage and enforce spatial learning experiences.
40 Funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the project is based at the Institut für Länderkunde in Leipzig and is being developed “in order to impart knowledge of the region to pupils in a playful way and to stimulate their interest in regional geography” in the form of “digital game-based learning” (IfL, 2020). Games like SpielRäume, which pursue a purpose and do not serve pure entertainment are academically referred to as serious games (Busch, 2018, p. 93 and f.). The transfer of knowledge in an in-situ learning environment, with the help of edutainment and outdoor education, is key to the project. Participants are encouraged to explore the cultural landscape of the Barnim nature park with a tablet computer and following game instructions. Through interactive methods they are encouraged to learn about the origin, development, transformation, and current use of the present cultural landscape of the park. The following sequence took place as part of an expert meeting of the IfL project SpielRäume in the Barnim nature park and is a personal experience report:
Ambiances , Varia 41
Rapidly crossing the birch forests and fields of the Barnim nature park, our minds are set on one goal – the ghost of Hobrecht. As per the game’s narrative, we have to catch him before the greater Berlin area perishes in an apocalyptic environmental catastrophe. A quick glance at the tablet computer in our hands, checking the position - the ghost is only a few meters away. We load the ghostduster and aim at the target. A touch on the display and swooooooosh: We did it! Hobrecht is trapped and Berlin has been saved.
41 SpielRäume is composed of the central elements game, equipment, and the existing cultural landscape. These elements can be understood as spatial qualities: in the given example as “virtual quality” (game), “material quality” (device), and “environmental and ambient landscape” (cultural landscape). These spatial qualities do not exist per se, but are created by players as spatial actors. Several elements of the setting can be understood as thresholds of such delineated spaces, including a tablet computer, the installed narrative game, and the cultural landscape. The three aspects form an inseparable interdependence, whose dynamic quality is indicated as immersivity. As intended by the producers, the gaming experience is enabled and inseparably connected with an induced learning process (see Figure 4). In contrast to “regular” games, crossing and re-crossing the threshold here has a didactic purpose.
Figure 4: Schematic adaptation of immersivity of the project SpielRäume
(Copyright: Rapp & Sommerlad)
42 The immersivity setting visualized above can be understood as a learning environment that enables a learning process resulting in an all-encompassing experience. Within this experience, immersive momenta may occur. Immersivity is explicitly produced by the game developers with the goal of creating an immersive experience. At this juncture, we are only interested in the participant-gamers insofar as they function as a kind of “immersive glue/adhesive” that holds the set-up together. The rules of a serious game function as regulative elements of spatial perception in which cross-
Ambiances , Varia 42
modal sensory channels (visual, audible, haptic, olfactory, and gustatory) are addressed.
43 From a socio-cultural geographical perspective, the mediation of such learning environments takes place in and through a complex augmented experience of space and place (Agnew, 1987; Cresswell, 2004, 2015; Freytag, 2014). From an interdisciplinary perspective, those considerations hold great potential for further reflection on immersivity in the context of serious games. Geographers in particular may also derive a meta-theoretical component from this project: studying to what extent such learning provisions can actually lead to an expanded understanding of space and place. An apparently perceived scope of action and immersion is limited by the multi-layered framework created by the game producers and designers (Busch, 2018, p. 257).
Conclusion
44 Understanding immersivity as the possibility of experience produced by delineated spaces, real or imagined, forces us to confront the diverse mechanisms which produce these spaces and therefore to ground our analyses in empirical, structural analyses. By shifting our focus from experiences to the productive forces that enable experiences (aesthetic and otherwise), we are able to study concrete, delineated spaces which aim at inducing an immersed state in the participant or recipient. This approach has a number of theoretical, methodological, but also institutional advantages, as it brings together various disciplines for whom the relationship between the conditions of experience and experience itself is constitutive. Most importantly, our focus on the way states of immersion are induced links various academic disciplines without dismissing the technical vocabulary and characteristic methodology of each field we have discussed here.
45 The immersivity of theme parks, for instance, is characterized, on the one hand, by a strict separation of the park from its surroundings, visual and otherwise. On the other hand, theme parks stage their visitors’ entering the immersive space as a series of ritualized actions that include bodily movements through architectural signs of passage (portals etc.). Occasionally, as in Phantasialand, these signs mimic the “plunging” metaphor commonly associated with immersion, forcing visitors to physically perform with their bodies what they are invited to experience in their minds.
46 Theatre studies measure the success of immersivity on an equal division between material, medial, and performative aspects, their interrelation and coherence. Participants gain a greater responsibility in contributing and becoming part of the present immersive experience that may result in an autopoietic feedback loop to reinforce its quality. What distinguishes immersive theatre from our other examples is that it imposes the restrictions, which other media only think as spatial delineations. What is essential here is the fact that actors become co-producers of space Performance, then, becomes the restriction of spatial potential, the residue that remains when all other options for movement and action are eliminated in the service of the play.
47 In films, immersivity emerges from the interplay of (1) aesthetic, (2) material, and (3) phenomenological dimensions that occur regardless of whether the movie is viewed
Ambiances , Varia 43
on a smartphone or in a classical movie theatre. When trying to study such interplay, however, we face the challenge of never being able to confront these three conditions individually, i.e. in their unmitigated, pure states. We must therefore focus on individual, temporally and spatially located instances of filmic representation – nodal points in a network-like structure, characterized by co-effects and plural agencies –, which present us with a reflection of this interplay in an aggregate state.
48 Immersivity in video games depends on the interplay between gaming actions and immersion-breaking references to the social or natural world. Players constantly cross that threshold in order to determine their course of action, and much of what we may call the experience of gaming depends on a game’s capacity to make players access social and cultural knowledge repositories (cultural, historical, etc.) from which they then synthesize those actions. While the sheer presence of the threshold is a necessary precondition for immersion, immersivity in games depends on the frequency with which players cross it. This frequency in turn depends on the depth of knowledge players bring to the table as well as the formal manner in which games prompt such crossings.
49 In gamified educational spaces, we locate immersivity in a what we call processual set- up, which authorizes interactions between actors and delineated spaces. This set-up consists of multiple discrete delineated spaces (virtual and material) and devices, but only becomes bound together and activated through human actors (designers and players). The mental states of the actors are not as relevant as their ability to activate the set-up mechanism. Activation of the mechanism and traversal of the set-up engenders a learning process, which is characterized by the delineation of the spaces involved and the manner in which they constantly intersect in new ways during play.
50 The question of what immersivity is and whether it can be studied productively emerged in our discussions precisely because we approached the issue from divergent disciplinary traditions and conventions. As the case studies above have shown, immersivity appears in numerous forms. Studying the spaces that potentially produce immersion requires theoretical and methodological adjustments to each approach. In all of these fields, the term immersivity helps us focus on the mechanisms that produce the cultural spaces responsible for immersivity: the theme park with its spatial arrangement that guides the visitor into an immersive experience; the space of the theater, where artificial and non-artificial spaces merge to produce a transitory experience; the film’s spatial qualities that produces the possibility for audience immersion; the video game, which combines gameplay with multifarious socio-cultural references to situate players in a state of flow and the mediation of knowledge in a gamified in-situ learning environment – all may be studied in terms of the qualities and mechanisms that enable the immersive experience. Theme parks show us how immersion depends significantly on the delineation of physical spaces; immersive theatre, meanwhile, breaks down these boundaries between the virtual and the material, but inscribes boundaries in the actions of its participants; in film various forms of spatial delineation cooperate on one level and collide on others; video games exploit the tensions that delineations invoke to engage players by prompting them to translate cultural knowledge into gaming actions; in gaming learning environments, this transfer may also manifest as real-world action, unfolding under a particular pedagogical program. As the case studies also show, while being broad enough to embrace phenomenological, hermeneutic, and empirical methods, the concept of
Ambiances , Varia 44
immersivity, through its focus on the production of immersive qualities, forces us to concretely address our subject matter, and to adjust the theoretical vocabulary to the cultural artifact at hand.
51 The focus is placed on the productive forces that may or may not result in corresponding experiences of immersion; but the experience itself is by no means excluded from such a theoretical and methodological framework. While the concept of immersivity is malleable enough to allow us to mediate experience and structures, it also forces us to ground the former in the latter. In fact, the complicated question of how the actual experience is logically linked to, or divorced from, these structures must be closely studied. In the meantime, immersivity avoids reducing objective structures to sheer experience, while acknowledging that experiences are the ultimate aim of these structures. As such, immersivity connects a host of theoretical issues that are too often seen as mutually exclusive.
52 Finally, the structure of our essay reflects a larger research agenda as well as an institutional setting that has produced this essay in the first place. Our suggestions are not only the result of rigorous theoretical considerations. As the broadness of our case studies shows, interdisciplinarity and intermediality are no mere academic buzzwords, but the result of a concrete institutional research agenda and interdisciplinary cooperation. In fact, only if these institutionalized discourses, with all their tensions and contradictions, are taken seriously do we see the potential to establish immersivity as a productive concept in an interdisciplinary discussion.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Agnew, John A. 1987. Place and Politics: The Geographical Mediation of State and Society. Boston: Allen & Unwin.
Alston, Adam. 2016. Beyond Immersive Theatre: Aesthetics, Politics and Productive Participation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Baudry, Jean-Louis. 1986 [1975]. Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus. In: Rosen, Philip (Ed.). Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader. New York: Columbia University Press. p. 299-318.
Bentham, Jeremy. 1871. The Theory of Legislation. London: Trübner.
Brecht, Bertolt. 2017. Kurze Beschreibung einer neuen Technik der Schauspielkunst, die einen Verfremdungseffekt hervorbringt. In: Roselt, Jens (Ed.). Seelen mit Methode. Schauspieltheorien vom Barock- bis zum postdramatischen Theater. Berlin: Alexanderverlag. p. 278-297.
Breyer, Thiemo & Kasprowicz, Dawid. 2019. Immersion. Grenzen und Metaphorik des digitalen Subjekts. Navigationen, Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturwissenschaft 19 (1). p. 7-16.
Busch, Philip. 2018. Spielerische Ansätze in der internationalen Zusammenarbeit. Gamification und Serious Games als Alternative zum traditionellen Methodenportfolio? [online]. Mainz: Johannes
Ambiances , Varia 45
Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. Available online at: https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis: 77-diss-1000019538 (consulted on August 29, 2019).
Calleja, Gordon. 2007. Revising Immersion: A Conceptual Model for the Analysis of Digital Game Involvement. In: DiGRA 07 (ed.). Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference. Situated Play, University of Tokyo, September 24-28. Tampere: Digital Games Research Association. p. 83-90. Available online at: http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/07312.10496.pdf (consulted on August 29, 2019).
Calleja, Gordon. 2011. In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation. Cambridge, Mass: MIT University Press.
Carlà, Filippo & Freitag, Florian. 2015. Ancient Greek Culture and Myth in the Terra Mítica Theme Park. Classical Receptions Journal 7 (2). p. 242-259.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1989 [1817]. Biographia Literaria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Craig, Alan B. & Sherman, William R. 2018. Understand Virtual Reality. Interface, Application, and Design. Cambridge, MA: Elsevier.
Cresswell, Tim. 2015 [2004]. Place. An Introduction. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 1990. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper.
Curtis, Robin & Voss, Christiane (eds.). 2008. Immersion, [Themenheft Montage AV Zeitschrift für Theorie und Geschichte audiovisueller Kommunikation. 17 (2)]. Marburg: Schüren.
D’Aloia, Adriano. 2012. Film in Depth: Water and Immersivity in the Contemporary Film Experience. Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Film and Media Studies 5. p. 87-106.
Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2003. Es werde Licht! Die Entstehung des Raumes aus dem Licht im Theater – Licht als Mittel der theatralen Inszenierung. Available online at: https://www.fu-berlin.de/presse/ publikationen/fundiert/archiv/2003_01/03_01_fischer_lichte/index.html (consulted on August 19, 2020).
Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2004. Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Forte, Maurizio. 2012. Immersive 3D Applications. In: Silberman, Neil Asher (Ed.): The Oxford Companion to Archaeology Vol. 2 (Second Edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 69-72.
Freytag, Tim. 2014. Raum und Gesellschaft. In: Lossau, Julia; Freytag, Tim & Lippuner, Roland (eds.). Schlüsselbegriffe der Kultur- und Sozialgeographie. Stuttgart: Ulmer. p. 12-24.
Friesen, Lowell & Cresswell, James. 2017. Rethinking priming in social psychology: Insight from James’ notions of habits and instincts. New Ideas in Psychology 46. p. 17-25.
Galimberti, Carlo; Ignazi, Sabrina; Vercesi, Pietro & Riva, Guiseppe. 2001. Communication and Cooperation in Network Environments: An Experimental Analysis. In: CyberPsychology & Behavior 4 (1). p. 131-146.
Göttel, Dennis. 2016. Die Leinwand. Eine Epistemologie des Kinos. München: Fink.
Grau, Oliver. 2003. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. (trans. Gloria Custance). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hagener, Malte. 2011. Wo ist Film (heute)? Film/Kino im Zeitalter der Medienimmanenz. In: Sommer, Gudrun; Hediger, Vinzenz & Fahle, Oliver (eds.). Orte filmischen Wissens. Filmkultur und Filmvermittlung im Zeitalter digitaler Netzwerke. Marburg: Schüren. p. 45-60.
Ambiances , Varia 46
Huhtamo, Erkki. 1995. Encapsulated Bodies in Motion: Simulators and the Quest for Total Immersion. In: Penny, Simon (ed.). Critical Issues in Electronic Media. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. p. 159-86.
Institut für Länderkunde (IfL). SpielRäume – Entdeckungs- und Erlebnisraum Landschaft. Available online at: https://leibniz-ifl.de/forschung/projekt/spielraeume-entdeckungs-und-erlebnisraum- landschaft (consulted on September 23, 2020).
Kolesch, Doris. 2016. Theater und Immersion. Das Theater kann von Anbeginn an als Dispositiv der Immersion aufgefasst werden – ein historischer Überblick von Doris Kolesch [online]. Blog. Berlin: Berliner Festspiele Blog. Available online at: https://blog.berlinerfestspiele.de/theater-und- immersion/ (consulted on November 21, 2019).
Liptay, Fabienne & Dogramaci, Burcu. 2015. Introduction. Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media. In: Liptay, Fabienne & Dogramaci, Burcu. (eds.): Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media. Leiden: Brill. p. 1-20.
Lombard, Matthew & Ditton, Theresa. 1997. At the Heart of It All: The Concept of Presence. The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3 (2). Available online at: https://doi.org/10.1111/j. 1083-6101.1997.tb00072.x (consulted on April 7, 2020).
Lonsway, Brian. 2009. Making Leisure Work. Architecture and the Experience Economy. New York: Routledge.
Machon, Josephine. 2013. Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Minsky, Marvin. 1980. Telepresence. Omni 2 (9). p. 45-51.
Mühlhoff, Rainer. 2018. Immersive Macht. Affekttheorie nach Spinoza und Foucault. Frankfurt/New York: Campus.
Murray, Janet H. 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Myers, David. 2017. Games Are Not: The Difficult and Definitive Guide to What Video Games Are. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
Neitzel, Britta. 2008. Medienrezeption Und Spiel. In: Distelmeyer, Jochen; Hanke, Christine & Mersch, Dieter (eds.). Game Over?! Perspektiven Des Computerspiels. Bielefeld: Transcript. p. 95–113.
Pine, B. Joseph & Gilmore, James H. 1999. The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage. Boston: Harvard Business Press.
Recuber, Tim. 2007. Immersion Cinema: The Rationalization and Reenchantment of Cinematic Space. Space and Culture 10 (3). p. 315–330.
Reijnders, Stijn & Waysdorf, Abby. 2018. Immersion, Authenticity and the Theme Park as Social Space: Experiencing the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. International Journal of Cultural Studies 21 (2). p. 173–188.
Ronchi, Alfredo M. 2009. eCulture. Cultural Content in the Digital Age. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.
Rubin, Judith (Ed.). 2019. The Global Attractions Attendance Report 2018 [online]. Burbank: Themed Entertainment Association. Available online at: https://www.aecom.com/wp-content/uploads/ 2019/05/Theme-Index-2018-4.pdf (consulted on March 31, 2020).
Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2015 [2001]. Narrative as Virtual Reality 2. Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Ambiances , Varia 47
Salen, Katie & Zimmerman, Eric. 2003. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press.
Saler, Michael T. As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary PreHistory of Virtual Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
SIGNA. Das Heuvolk [Theater. Nationaltheater Mannheim/Benjamin Franklin Village. June 16, 2017]. Available online at: https://www.nationaltheater-mannheim.de/de/schauspiel/ stueck_details.php?SID=2854 (consulted on March 23, 2020). See the company’s official website: https://signa.dk/about, 27.11.2019.
Slotkin, Richard. 1973. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press.
White, Gareth. 2012. On Immersive Theatre. Theatre Research International 37 (3). p. 221–23.
Wolf, Mark J.P. 2012. Building Imaginary Worlds. The Theory and History of Subcreation. New York: Routledge.
Wolf, Werner. 2013. Aesthetic Illusion. In: Wolf, Werner; Bernhart, Walter & Mahler, Andreas (eds.). Immersion and Distance. Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media. Amsterdam: Rodopi. p. 1-63.
NOTES
1. Our junior interdisciplinary research group “Immersive Spaces” is located in the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and part of the research platform SoCuM. This article documents our major discussions and the conversations we had with international scholars. 2. In social psychology, specific visual, olfactory, auditory, haptic, or linguistic stimuli are supposed to start a chain reaction that ultimately results in particular behavioral responses. “An underlying assumption of this research,” Friesen and Cresswell note, “is that stimuli are causally related to specific thoughts and actions in a mechanistic and determinate way” (2017, p. 17; emphasis added).
ABSTRACTS
This article proposes to shift the scholarly focus from the conceptually, terminologically, and methodologically fuzzy notion of “immersion” to the concept of “immersivity,” and thus from a discussion of experiences to an analysis of the productive forces that enable such experiences (aesthetic and otherwise). Using case studies from theme parks, film, and immersive theatre to video games and immersive educational spaces, we argue that immersivity is a distinct term that denotes an inherent quality of objects in general and of mediated, delineated, real and virtual spaces in particular. We assume that in all of these examples, spatial qualities and modes interact in particular ways to facilitate immersion. Elucidating these interactions requires discussing examples from different disciplinary contexts. It is precisely through this interdisciplinary approach that we take a first step towards understanding immersivity, as we pinpoint cross- disciplinary congruences wherever possible. The article thus offers the starting point for a
Ambiances , Varia 48
transdisciplinary, qualitative, experimental, and analytical model of immersivity. Following a theoretical introduction to the topic of immersion, we will first conceptualize our interdisciplinary understanding of immersion and immersivity and then launch into a transdisciplinary dialogue about examples of immersive spaces.
L’objectif de cet article est de réorienter l’intérêt scientifique sur la notion floue « d’immersion » vers le concept « d’immersivité », et donc de passer de l’analyse des expériences-mêmes à une analyse des efforts et circonstances de production de telles expériences (esthétiques et autres). À partir des analyses de cas sur les parcs d’attractions, les films et le théâtre immersif, les jeux vidéo et les espaces éducatifs immersifs, nous faisons le constat que « l’immersivité » est un terme distinct qui désigne une qualité inhérente aux objets en général et aux espaces médiatisés, délimités, réels et virtuels en particulier. Nous assumons que dans tous ces exemples, les qualités et les modes spatiaux interagissent à chaque fois de façon particulière pour faciliter l’immersion. Afin de comprendre et d’élucider ces exemples, il nous semble nécessaire de discuter et relayer des exemples issus de contextes disciplinaires différentes. C’est notamment par cette approche interdisciplinaire que nous comptons faire les premiers pas vers une compréhension de « l’immersivité » en identifiant les croisements et congruences interdisciplinaires à chaque point où cela semble possible. Cet article a donc pour but de poser les fondements d’un modèle transdisciplinaire, qualitatif, expérimental et analytique de l’immersivité. Après une introduction théorique sur le terme de l’immersion, nous développons d’abord notre compréhension interdisciplinaire de l’immersion et de l’immersivité, puis nous lancerons un dialogue transdisciplinaire sur des exemples d’espaces immersifs.
INDEX
Mots-clés: immersivité, immersion, espaces immersifs, interdisciplinarité, seuil, parcs d’attractions, jeux vidéo, théâtre immersif, cinéma immersif, espaces éducatifs Keywords: immersivity, immersion, immersive spaces, interdisciplinarity, threshold, theme parks, video games, immersive theater, immersive cinema, educational spaces
AUTHORS
FLORIAN FREITAG Florian Freitag is professor of American Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany). After having received his PhD from the University of Konstanz in 2011, Freitag has taught at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and CUNY. Freitag is the author of The Farm Novel in North America (2013), Popular New Orleans (2020), and several journal articles and book chapters on theme parks (amongst others, in The Journal of Popular Culture and Continuum). He can be reached at [email protected]
CÉLINE MOLTER Céline Molter is working on her PhD in anthropology as a research fellow of the DFG-funded project “Das Dorf Christi” at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. For her dissertation, she examines the discursive and performative production of Christianity in themed spaces. She has taught courses on religion, ritual, popular culture and research methods at the Institute of Anthropology and African Studies at Mainz University. Her research interests include popular religion, community building and staging, tourism, and
Ambiances , Varia 49
(religious) theme parks. Profile: https://dasdorfchristi.com/index.php/personen.html, E-Mail: [email protected]
LAURA KATHARINA MÜCKE Laura Katharina Mücke is a PhD candidate in film and media studies at the University of Vienna (Austria). In her dissertation, she focuses on immersion as meta-ontological category between subject autonomy and technical governmentality. Further research interests include film phenomenology, filmaesthetic experiences, the paradigms of closeness and distance, film theory, interactive media, post cinema, media dispositives in their historical context and media in the Middle East Conflict. Mücke’s article “Nähe und Distanz im interaktiven Spielfilm. Von Kinoautomat (1967) to Bandersnatch (2018)” has been published in Montage AV 19.2 (2019). Contact: https://tfm.univie.ac.at/ueber-uns/personal/laura-katharina-muecke/
HELENA RAPP Helena Rapp is a research associate and lecturer (BA, MA) at the Institute of Geography (Cultural Geography) at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. In her PhD thesis she deals with (inter-)cultural strategies of the 20th & 21st century using the example of cultural brokerage and Native American art. The project is supported by TERRA Foundation for American Art. Cultural and social geography are the main subjects of her research focusing cultural encounters, arts, tourism and empirical atmospheric research with a specific interest on cruises & methodological approaches. Profile: http://www.geo.uni-mainz.de/rapp Email: [email protected]
DAMIEN B. SCHLARB Damien B. Schlarb earned his Ph.D. from Georgia State University. He works as assistant professor (limited term) at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany, where he teaches courses on American literature and culture. His research interests include nineteenth-century American literature and culture, Early American religion, and digital game studies. He has performed layout and editorial work for the academic journals South Atlantic Review and Amerikastudien / American Studies. His forthcoming book discusses Herman Melville’s engagement with biblical moral philosophy. His current research project examines the various notions of work in video games. Profile: http://www.obama-institute.com/schlarb/. Email: schlarbd@uni- mainz.de
ELISABETH SOMMERLAD Elisabeth Sommerlad is research associate at the Institute of Geography (Human Geography Team) at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Germany). She studied Geography, Communication Studies and Sociology and received her PhD from JGU Mainz in 2019 with a thesis on Intercultural Encounters in Feature Films. She is dedicated to researching questions of media- and film geography and her research addresses questions of medial staging and construction of intercultural encounters, identity and belonging. She is teaching BA and MA students in Human and Cultural Geography. Furthermore, she is managing editor of the book series Media Geography at Mainz. Contact: [email protected]
CLEMENS SPAHR Clemens Spahr is assistant professor of American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. He is the author of A Poetics of Global Solidarity: Modern American Poetry and Social Movements (Palgrave 2015) and Radical Beauty: American Transcendentalism and the Aesthetic Critique of Modernity (Schoeningh 2011). He has published in Nineteenth-Century Prose, NOVEL: A Forum on
Ambiances , Varia 50
Fiction, and Amerikastudien/American Studies. His current book project “Romantic Education” investigates the relationship between literary Romanticism and the educational institutions of antebellum America. Contact: [email protected]
DOMINIC ZERHOCH Dominic Zerhoch is a fellow at the project “Das Dorf Christi. Institutionentheoretische und funktionshistorische Perspektiven auf Oberammergau und sein Passionsspiel im 19.-21. Jh.” and is currently working on his PhD at the Institute of Film, Theater, Media and Culture Studies at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz (Germany). He worked as a director and assistant director at the Theatre of Heidelberg and in Stuttgart and co- founded the international and interdisciplinary PhD-Network DIS(S)-CONNECT. His research interests are Oberammergau and its Passion Play, corporeality and theories of embodiment, methodology of theater historiography, spatial theory, and scenography. Contact: [email protected]
Ambiances , Varia