Immersing the User by Jake Parry

➡️ This presentation is part of IRCAM Forum Workshops Paris / Enghien-les-Bains March 2026

In contemporary media culture, immersive experiences are often presented as appealing qualitative states through which the user may escape the realities of everyday life via absorption in technological mediation. Within this framing, mediation becomes a prescriptive process in which audio-visual stimuli are assigned a functional role of masking, working to block out the external world whilst prioritising the private enclosure of the self (Hagood, 2019). As such, the aesthetics of immersion rest on a principle of subjective, internal perception that tends towards an affective solipsism, privileging individual sensation while restricting reflexive awareness of mediation itself (Schrimshaw, 2017).

In the context of listening, these conditions work to sustain engagement with imminent sensory stimuli while simultaneously closing off the possibility for critical attention to the processes of production that structure the experience. From a behavioural science perspective, immersion is described as an intense focus on a specific, immediate activity in which attention to competing stimuli is diminished or suppressed (Murch et al., 2020). Such states are characterised by continuity and flow, limiting the listener’s capacity to ask questions such as: how is this experience produced, and for what purposes? Immersive media frequently conceals the organisation of technological processes and material infrastructures, absorbing the listener within a bounded zone of attention and affect (Schüll, 2012).

As immersive sound is increasingly adopted by commercial media platforms and marketed as a functional means of escape, the importance of interrogating the ideological and conceptual foundations of immersion becomes critical if artistic practice and technological innovation are to avoid uncritical corroboration. Against a backdrop of rapid technological development in spatial audio, this talk addresses convergences between art and product, examining how immersive strategies circulate between experimental practice and commercial design. Using gambling media as a case study, it highlights problematic features of the immersive paradigm, illustrating how sound in this context is carefully engineered to regulate attention, sustain engagement and elicit compulsive behaviours, while simultaneously obscuring the extractive mechanics that drive commercial profit.

Beyond this analysis, the talk turns toward practices and technologies that actively subvert these problematised dynamics of immersion. By foregrounding mediation, disruption, and material process, it considers how spatial audio might be used not simply to intensify immersion but to expose, resist, or reconfigure the conditions under which immersive experiences are produced. In doing so, the presentation gestures toward a critical practice that moves beyond immersion as an unquestioned aesthetic goal. Practice where the listener’s active criticality, interpretation and relation are emphasised over the user’s passive envelopment, where the outside world is confronted and acted upon rather than “sinking into silence” (Bull, 2010, p. 56).