Ben Vickers | Interior Technologies (working title)

“Immersive” now almost always means hardware: headsets, projection, spatial audio – technologies that sit on top of the body. There is an older lineage in which immersive states were produced inside it: contemplative prayer, jhana, dhikr, the arts of memory, breathwork – interior technologies, refined over millennia and still in use.

Since the 1960s, art has been addressed chiefly to the thinking mind. “Interior Technologies” asks what happens when the viewer’s perceptual state is treated as part of the work, and what a new generation of instruments, built to engage attention and consciousness directly, might have to do with it.