Abstract

In his extremely suggestive essay entitled 'Towards an Immersive Intelligence', artist and theorist Joseph Nechvatal defines immersive virtual reality art as 'an art that has a continuous, coherent quality and strives to ambiently include everything of perceptual worth within its domain in an overall, enveloping totality that is concerted and without an evident frame or border'1. Television, on the face of it, is not a medium capable of providing any form of sensory immersion: compared to the Imax or to a trip through virtual reality goggles, its screen (even in its 'giant' sizes) remains ridiculously small. More importantly, whereas immersion requires the intense capture of our full attention in the enveloping totality it artificially creates, our viewing of television is generally distracted and superficial