Immersive art online long meant virtual tours: reproducing a room and walking through it in a browser. An interactive work does something else. It does not exist before someone enters it, and it is not the same for two visitors.
Three generations of works
The reproduced work
A digitisation. The visitor looks, at a distance, at something that exists elsewhere. Nothing is altered by their presence.
The reactive work
It responds to an action: a click triggers a sound, a movement distorts an image. The relation is immediate but shallow — the work keeps nothing.
The work that observes
It asks nothing and does not visibly respond. It records a way of being there: where you go, what you avoid, what you give time to. What it produces is not a reaction but a reading.
What occupying a space gives to read
Environmental psychology has studied measures a questionnaire cannot reach: interpersonal distance, voluntary exposure time, movement paths, avoided zones.
These have a rare property: they resist the wish to answer well. You can lie about what you like. You cannot easily decide to spend four minutes in front of something that does not hold you.
Where a questionnaire measures the image you hold of yourself, a work that observes measures what you do when you believe nothing is at stake.
Art and neuroscience: what is solid, and what is not
The pairing produces the best and the worst. Established: aesthetic perception engages measurable reward circuits; exposure to certain environments changes physiological state; visual attention follows predictable regularities.
Not established: talk of "quantum frequencies", claims to read thought, the idea that an artistic device has diagnostic value. Quantum vocabulary applied to consciousness is metaphor, not physics — and it is better to say so than to let it stand.
What remains is true and sufficient: an observed behaviour is more reliable data than a declaration.
RÉSONANCE
RÉSONANCE is a chamber of mineral concrete, a floor of black water, zenithal light, twelve steles. It is pixel-streamed from a rendering server: the visitor walks through it from a browser, installing nothing.
No question is asked. Fifty-seven variables are composed from movement alone. On leaving, a universe of presences appears — arranged in three regards: what resembles you, what you might come to like, and what does not resemble you. The third is the most useful.