- Is this immersive art?
- Is it a participatory installation?
Why or why not?
I know I sound like a broken record on immersive art sometimes, questioning what the term means when it’s been stretched so thin as to become meaningless.
So imagine my surprise when I came across the above. What started as a Mission Street ad has succumbed to a type of (accidental?) participatory art.
Quite a bit of effort has gone into the collective act of defacing this poster.
Does this make it immersive? I would argue that it does. The act of participation is by its nature immersive, the call to action driven by the same invisible instinct that tells us to write on bathroom stalls with a Sharpie.
The bigger question: is it art? Here, I think the answer is amorphous. While it didn’t start out as art or even with an intention to become art, one could easily argue that the very nature of participation has transformed it into a collective, temporary art piece.
What is art, after all, if not a form of experience?
