Subversion and Innovation in Immersive Film and Television Productions in Visual Threshold of Technological Aesthetics

Abstract

Empowered by the age of digital technology, the aesthetic morphology of film and television art has undergone a disruptive change, immersive media producing films and television that create a new kind of spectacle-like sensory experience. Immersive film and television productions seek to create a “surreal” artistic landscape, where the imaginative images that exist in the human mind become real and perceptible fields with the assistance and intervention of technology. The boundaries between the real and the imaginary world are broken down. The audience is no longer a spectator to the art of film and television, but an experiencer placed in a realistic and perceptible environment. Digital technology allows the interaction in immersive film and television productions to actually “live” in the film and television productions temporarily, not merely to be a transient interactive experience, and giving the audience the power to alter the narrative to a certain extent. The near-zero aesthetic distance, on the one hand, increases the audience’s transient empathy and communion with the film and television production, while on the other hand, it weakens their capacity for reflection. On the surface, these audiences are given more power and freedom. In reality, however, these audiences are perhaps more easily to be disciplined by the constructs of meaning presented in the film and television.