The immersive experience in exploration of abandoned spaces

The article is devoted to an examination of the experience gained through visiting abandoned spaces as an immersive environment in the context of a multisensory cultural turn. It involves a total immersion of the recipient into the perceived environment, allowing to experience intense emotions and redefine personal physical boundaries. Abandoned spaces free the body from performative constraints and allow it to move improvisationally through various structures, experiencing surroundings and perspectives that challenge conventional urban aesthetics. A special role in the process of immersion is played by the established mythology of abandoned landscapes, formed by the subculture of urban explorers, as well as their aesthetics, which demonstrate the disintegration of temporality and experience the dynamics of cultural processes. On the one hand, abandoned spaces materialize an inaccessible past, evoking feelings of nostalgia, while on the other hand, they contain unconscious motives for the recipient to expect future cataclysmic events in human history. The most important aspect of immersion is experiencing the affect, which allows for the deterritorialization of expected cultural meanings and the optics of space perception. Immersion in abandoned, forgotten, and hidden environments allows for a reconsideration of the phenomenon of hospitality, the new understanding of which emerges from a postanthropological perspective that explores the unstable boundary between the “foreign” and the “familiar,” the “host” and the “guest,” the “cultural” and the “natural,” the “living” and the “dead,” the “human” and the “non-human.” Abandoned spaces are viewed as “posthuman,” left entirely not only to the passage of time with its natural processes of decay, decomposition, and forgetting, but also to the process of revitalization by non-human agents. Immersive practice explores the possibility of hospitality, which involves resolving cultural binarism in an unnatural and unfamiliar environment for humans. When faced with the nonhuman aspect of space, immersive affect helps to identify an inner nonhuman sequence, allowing us to abandon human exclusivity paradigms and create a new optic of perceiving the world as an active environment that requires tuning into each other and fitting autopoietically into the world of all agents acting within it. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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