The New York exhibit of America’s Original Experimental Celebration of the Art of Vincent van Gogh at New York’s Pier 36. Photo by: Nina Westervelt. CC-BY, Wikimedia Commons.

Immersive experiences — a must to survive as museums?

7 min readMar 12, 2024

This text was written in March 2024 for the Swedish National Heritage Board’s blog Omvärld och insikt.

Are museums being overtaken in popularity by the experience industry? Recently The Art Newspaper published an article with the title “Tipping point: How new immersive institutions are changing the art world.” discussing the emergence of immersive experiences as tourist attractions, venues surpassing major museum institutions in visitor numbers.

Outernet London is a gallery with giant Ultra HD screens that mainly delivers spectacular audiovisual experiences. Behind the gallery is the company Outernet, a global media and entertainment company that focuses on experiences in big cities, merging music, film, art, games, and shopping experiences. In the article, author Chris Michaels notes that this is just one of 100s of galleries and entertainment venues focusing on new kinds of visual culture, offering sensational immersive experiences.

The visitor numbers to these places are huge. Outernet London had over 6 million visitors in 2023, compared to British Museum which had visitors just below this figure. A central point that the author makes in his article is precisely how these so called immersive institutions compete with museums for visitors, and how museums cannot stand passively and observe this development.

“Whether they turn out to be partners or competitors for museums and galleries, the immersive institutions … are a powerful emerging force. For many museums, it is a question of when, not if, they engage.”

It sounds alarming, but the question is not new. In the international museum sector, immersive experiences have been noticed and discussed for the last 10–15 years. The big question has been — how do museums keep up with the trend, and how can they become equally attractive to the public? The competition for the audience, and also the debate around immersive experiences has become more tangible in the last six or seven years for example with the rise of the Japanese Team Lab, which developed both museums and touring experiences, and the French Atelier des Lumières with their art-oriented experiences displaying, among others, Klimt , Cezanne and Chagall. The question is, as the author of the article points out, what these immersive institutions mean for traditional museums.

Immersive art in Berlin, Germany. Photo: Lear 21, CC-BY-SA, Wikimedia Commons.

Immersive experiences — relevant for museums?

In the quest to keep up with this development, it is inevitably of interest for museum managers to think about the significance of immersive experiences, when seeking to attract audiences, existing and new. It’s easy to fall for awesome “ blockbuster “ experiences that are guaranteed to draw crowds, and it’s no coincidence that we have also in Sweden seen touring exhibitions such as van Gogh and Titanic, and experiences like The Paradox Museum. But is there any substance to these spectacular experiences? The criticism from the museum sector has been that they hardly contribute to deeper knowledge on a topic, or that they do not provide more than a moment’s pleasure (see, for example, Ed Rodley ‘s article from 2022, Taking the plunge).

At the same time there is a development in the commercial sector. More companies are paying attention to the need for rich content and storytelling. We see emerging crossovers between immersive institutions and theme parks, such as the new Katana Inc.’s Immersive Fort Tokyo which opens in March 2024. The experiences offered are deeper and extend well before and after the visit, which still makes Chris Michaels’ argument about immersive institutions as competitors to museums relevant.

We cannot avoid the question: How do we tackle the issue of immersive experiences from a museum perspective?

The definition of immersive experiences

A first good step is to look at a museum-relevant definition of immersive experiences. It is about experiences that give the visitor the impression of being completely surrounded by, and being part of, another environment. Simplified, it is about creating a movement of the individual from the everyday here and now, for example with the help of technology, such as massive projections in a large room, or through a VR experience.

However, immersive is fundamentally about a psychological state, where the visitor experiences a displacement in both time and space from the real physical world. Technology is neither necessary nor, for that matter, sufficient in itself to create an immersive experience. The experience of immersion depends on the content’s ability, possibly in combination with technology, and a physical (sometimes designed) environment, to evoke the feeling of being moved across time and space. Whether or not immersion is achieved also depends on the individual’s perceptual limits and abilities, and state of mind.

Museums have long worked with immersion in the sense of creating environments that move the visitor in time and space. The open-air museums’ authentic environments, classic dioramas or multisensory exhibitions that make the visitor really understand and “step into” a historical era or experience a phenomenon. And of course, museums often strive to enhance experiences with stories from a specific place or time, stories that evoke emotions and engagement and capture the audience’s attention. But is it enough, and are we doing it well enough? Do we enable transportation and movement of the individual to the same degree that the immersive institutions do? Unfortunately, the answer is most often no.

Immersive Art Show: WERK in Progress (Immersive Art Factory). Photo: Kunstkraftwerk Leipzig, CC-BY-SA, Wikimedia Commons.

The immersive museum experience

Immersive institutions do something that museums don’t, something that makes the audience turn up in thousands and even millions. What can we learn from immersive institutions, as museums? Awesome immersive experiences are relevant to museums, not the kind that lack content and only provide a moment’s pleasure, but rich museum experiences that also support a movement of the individual, through stories and through active participation, that extends before and after the visit, and which have a positive impact both on individuals and the society.

The latter is one of the differences between immersive institutions and museums. Museums have a unique role in society and can contribute to the development of immersive experiences with new perspectives and stories, creating an impact both on the life experience of individuals and the development of society on a larger level. The goal of immersive experiences in museums ought to be to achieve more than just high visitor numbers.

Creating impact with immersive experiences is about fulfilling the museum’s overall goals for public offerings and dissemination, being a good storyteller, a good experience designer who can weave together stories and experiences, having the individual in focus, facilitating participation and inclusion, and designing interactivity for example through gamification. It is also about understanding the museum as an ecosystem of touch points and platforms, where the immersive experience might only be part of the whole experience. As Ed Rodley argues, a portal to a deeper and extended experience.

The prerequisites are there. What is specific about museums is that they almost always work with some form of sensory stimulation. Good immersive experiences work on several levels through sensory immersion, evoking emotions, narrative movement and interactivity through gameful participation (Rodley, 2022).

There is a lot for museums to learn from successful immersive institutions. At the same time, it is not firstly about producing expensive digital productions. Museums fundamentally need to develop their public offerings and evolve the concept of exhibitions and program activities — the traditional categories of museum experiences that most museums work with today. It is not a coincidence that many museums are working towards the multi-platform experience, recruiting competence for creating physical, digital and hybrid museum experiences, and not least develop skills in storytelling and various forms of interactive formats such as gamification. Even more exciting is the opportunity to integrate collecting, documentation, knowledge building and inclusive methods into the public and immersive museum experiences.

In other words, it is highly relevant for museums to monitor the development of immersive institutions, to watch and learn. Immersive experiences have the potential to contribute to a much-needed development of museums’ public offerings. At the same time, museums, as often highly trusted institutions in society, building on a long tradition of knowledge- and experience-based mediation, have the potential to contribute to an exciting development of the format of immersive experiences.

Kajsa Hartig

Further reading

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2024/01/28/how-new-immersive-institutions-are-changing-the-art-world

https://blooloop.com/theme-park/in-depth/immersive-fort-tokyo/