By Mitchell Ryder

I heard what sounded like metal chains, the clangs of which reverberated off the large, concrete walls. Construction? There were no other signs of a renovation. The people around me didn’t seem to hear or acknowledge the noise, continuing to peer at the tablets and books on display. I determined to walk towards the sounds, which, the closer I moved, increasingly resembled thunder.

As I turned a corner, on and across the floor, grim faces cut from steel plates stared up at me. They seemed to contort in agony, screaming, and that screaming seemed somehow to be a response to our footsteps. I watched others in the room walk across the faces without much notice.

With no clear destination, why carelessly trod across the images? I tried to step over them with care, but as delicately as I tried to move, the metal clinked with each step. Sometimes these faces, now layered one on another, would lean and crash down, the sonic effect booming in the hallway. It became clear that it was I who rattled the chains bound to these faces; I was the cause of the depictions of suffering.

The interactive space was just one exhibit in the Jewish Museum Berlin, a place of collective memory. The provocative sonic symbolism of pain I had just experienced transported me into at least a shadow the Jewish experience. How did this happen? How could this choreography elicit such a reaction?

During my month in Berlin as part of a study abroad project, I determined to explore what I perceive to be an increasing desire for and interest in simulations, visual or image-based “experiences” that promise emotion over, above and sometimes in displacement of knowledge or logic. Are we increasingly living in a matrix, or at least seeking its equivalent? Are we commodifying at the expense of authenticity? What does “interactive” even mean?

To help me explore some of Berlin’s immersive spaces, I had the help of Jean Baudrillard, a French philosopher and cultural theorist who provided me with a handy conceptual toolbox. He died in 2007. One of his more provocative ideas he called the Simulacrum, or that which depicts reality until eventually usurping that reality. In perhaps a more accessible definition, simulacra describes simulations of things that never existed and our preference for the simulations over the real thing. Disney’s theme parks are prime examples, providing paying customers with the simulation of thrills and chills without any real risk and, therefore, any authenticity.

With Baudrillard as my guide, what better way to frame this idea of perceived constructs, or constructs that we have made to help us perceive that which isn’t but this term: Immersive experiences?

Baudrillard mapped four stages that a “copy” travels on its way from reality toward replacing that reality: An unedited reflection; a distortion or perversion of reality, like applying an Instagram filter; a fake that nonetheless claims to be real; and, finally, hyperreality, or a DisneyWorld-style creation with no bearing on the real world at all, a reality unto itself. Hyperreality feels like more than the real by being much less than real.

Over the course of a month, I visited four of Berlin’s more prominent immersive experiences:  Ikono at Alexandrplatz, Aura Labs and the Van Gogh Immersive on Berlin’s east side, and C/O Berlin not far from the Brandenburg Gate (see interactive map for full immersive experience). I found that each one settles at a different point on Baudrillard’s spectrum or progression, and that the point on the spectrum matters far less than what it does once it gets there.

Three of the four cluster into the same category of commercial hyperreality, paired, oddly, with low immersion. As with DisneyWorld, the hyperreality in these spaces tends to serve commodification, consumerism and simply entertainment or amusement rather than anything of substance, and the more hyperreal an exhibit becomes, the less immersive it can reasonably claim to be.

Ikono

Let’s go from worst to first, starting with Ikono, which is situated in central Berlin in the popular Alexandrplatz. This exhibit space sends visitors on one large loop, its rooms dimly lit and labeled on small plaques that set a mental scene meant to evoke some personal connection. At the center of the loop is a swimming pool-sized ball pit, where families and kids fling themselves into glowing plastic spheres. This is clearly meant to be the main attraction; most visitors lounged among the balls, leaving the surrounding rooms nearly empty for me to explore.

Each of the rooms attempts to appeal to childlike wonder, but in this they fail in their hyperreality. For example, a room built in the artistic tradition of Kabuki masks and Japanese street life cannot deliver on that when all it offers is a short hallway of stylized imagery and flat prints. A room meant to comment on the beauty of fish falls short when kimonos and feathers are littered across an otherwise empty space. Each room becomes its own independent attraction, a Simulacrum, untethered to anything authentic or real, but also failing to achieve for the visitor any meaningful sense of immersion.

Ikono promises visitors they will be able to unleash their creativity and “foster fun photos.” When the production of an image, even if not especially Insta-ready images, is the goal, what hope for transcendent “experiences” can there be? How creative can one be diving into a pit of plastic balls?

Aura Labs

In the RAW-Gelände area of what once was East Berlin, Aura Labs falls into roughly the same category as Ikono because it focuses on interface and atmosphere rather than anything of substance. An “experimental media art space,” according to its website, the curators use motion-capture, recording installations and AI to shape images or audio around the viewer’s movements in real time, including gestures, voices and facial expressions. Call it an impressionistic light and sound show.

The main draw for Aura Labs is its Immersive Exhibition, a room that projects short films and graphics onto every surface. Most of these projections achieve less than immersion; they are more movies in 3D. You feel like you’re inside the film but not inside that film’s story. There is no story.

Jessica C., who has staffed Aura Labs for three years, but who did not wish to provide her surname, said the venue is “much more of a visual experience” than an immersive one, but that “if people pay attention to the writing, people could find some meaning in that,” as well. If, however, viewers are so focused on the spectacle that they miss the writing, a visual experience is the only option. The AI-powered visuals are a clear example of simulacra as commodity. The immersion mimics reality just closely enough to pass for it, without actually letting anyone into that reality.

Van Gogh Immersive

Next door to Aura Labs is the Van Gogh Immersive, also called Vincent: Between Delusion and Wonder. It is this space that of the four I visited pushes furthest into hyperreality. Its gallery features van Gogh prints, not paintings. These copies are large, backlit, and color-“corrected” such that the brushwork that once flowed from a genius flattens into vivid, flowing color.

An audio guide narrates the Dutch artist’s life story, with the voice of an actor standing in for family members and for van Gogh himself. This is one more facet of what could be an authentic story, Van Gogh’s story, re-staged by people with no claim to that story or to his work. The exhibit’s centerpiece is a short film in a second space outfitted with projectors. Here van Gogh’s paintings are animated. They twist, grow, spread, recoil, and disappear after spreading across the room’s four walls as if they were being painted in real time. While vivid, this is about as far from the originals as copies can get.

Sofia Brilliant, who has worked at the venue since before the immersive room was installed, said the projection room draws more visitors than the larger gallery (and story) that leads to it.

“The kinds of people who come to see this aren’t here for the art, but the experience,” she said, failing to consider, as just one example, that van Gogh aficionados already know well the artist’s story. Why would these knowledgeable visitors loll about reading second-rate captions and backgrounders when the feature is the projection room? Especially in Berlin’s July heat? (The space is not air conditioned.)

For a variety of reasons, most visitors walk straight past the prints and into the projection room, preferencing pathos, or emotion, and the “experience” over knowledge, fact, and any deeper understanding of the artist perhaps the exhibition could furnish.

C/O Berlin

C/O Berlin is at a different register. Here reality is altered only slightly, but in the direction of clarity or focused attention rather than distortion and amusement. Located in the historic Amerika Haus, this photography and visual media exhibition venue showcases a rotating selection of works from 10 world-renowned photographers and emerging international talent.

In one of C/O’s galleries, “Walter Schels’s Life Before Death,” portraits of terminally ill patients are paired with their own final words. Presented in a confining room dark and heavy enough to carry the weight, and the taboo, of the subject matter, the exhibit showcases the portrait photography of Walter Schels. He created the exhibit in collaboration with his partner, journalist and author Beate Lakotta, who recorded interviews with the terminally ill subjects during their final weeks.

One exhibition visitor, Mannet S., quietly reads each patient’s story. I asked her what she made of someone so directly photographing death. Her response surprised me. Eliding the moral questions the exhibit raises, she said she felt that she could hear the subjects’ voices as if they were still speaking. The room “makes you not think there is no hope in everything,” she said.

Down a hallway, “The Lure of the Image” curates some of the web’s stranger artifacts: ASMR videos, “cute” and “cursed” images, body pillow ads, emoji, and a banner of memes and e-girls (electronic or internet girls). All of this Gen Z youth culture is featured in Joiri Minaya’s #dominicanwomengooglesearch, a collage comprising image results of searches for “lure of the image.”

The temporary exhibit “invites visitors to explore the visual worlds of social media feeds, dating app profiles, beauty filters . . . and pixelated screenshots used for conspiracy or protest,” according to C/O’s website. The artworks track the complex mechanisms of the lure in digital spaces by shedding light on how images direct our attention, provoke emotions and influence opinions. Minaya’s strategic juxtapositioning can be seen as a form of Simulacrum, one grounded in genuine photographs of actual women, but distorted by whatever surfaced them.

Two visitors there, Jette Z. and Roi O., said what I was thinking more clearly than I could manage. Roi said he felt that he had arrived “too late” because “everyone is already in it,” referring to how thoroughly algorithms and online culture determine our screen time. Whatever warning might be implicit in the exhibit came too late, in other words.

Jette focused on scale. The exhibit gave her “a grasp of how small I am and how big it – the internet – is,” she said.

Jewish Museum Berlin

The most immersive experience of the trip is not marketed as such, and given the subject matter, this is not a surprise. In fact, I might be cheating a bit by including this “experience,” but its reliance on pathos seems to be worth thinking about. And the immersive experiential result of the space strikes me as a useful bar or threshold with which to measure the others.

The Memorial’s “Between the Lines” building designed by Daniel Libeskind is itself a Simulacrum of the Jewish experience under Nazi and Soviet rule, its grief and distress built directly into the architecture. Here the intent is never to entice or persuade, only to invite empathy for people long since gone, whose experiences none of us can fully comprehend. This marks the Memorial as fundamentally different from the Ikono ball pit or the van Gogh projection room. While all three are simulacra of one kind or another, Liebskind’s building announces nothing. The experiencing of it is choreographed only by the architecture and the design of the space. And the meaning of this experience? Completely up to the visitor.

The building’s first major space is the Holocaust Tower, a concrete shaft almost completely devoid of light and sound except for a slit of sunlight near the faraway ceiling and, if you listen closely, some faint street noise. Standing still, I could just make out those sounds; the instant I moved, my footsteps quieted them. Sight, sound, smell, and a closeted feeling of confinement: This is an immersion of the senses. I have never felt so trapped in my life.

Next, the Garden of Exile, a sloping field of concrete pillars with olive trees at the top, the uneven ground pitched at angles contrasting from the pillars themselves such that walking among them disorients to the point that you wobble. It felt something like walking the side of a mountain, and with the same effect: A mild dizziness one might get after too much time at sea searching for the horizon. Tripping over cobblestones, I had not seen that coming.

Finally, Shalekhet: Fallen Leaves, Menashe Kadishman’s floor of flat iron faces with which I opened these reflections. This is the floor I walked across at the start of this piece. However carefully I stepped, the metal clanged, the sound of chains dragged across one another, echoing through the open hall. Of everything I encountered in a month of exhibits built to represent experiences their makers never lived, Shalekhet is the most direct, the most visceral. It haunts still. The connotations are of war and death, and it seemed I could physically feel the weight of these ideas, a heaviness that followed me through the rest of the museum.

Becoming part of the story

Maybe it matters more what a simulation is trying to do than what it is attempting to simulate. Ikono’s ball pit seeks to amuse. Shalekhet’s floor of iron faces has much higher aspirations. Both, at least technically, strive for something we might call hyperreal, curations with no direct claim on the events they either gesture to or need to cohere. And while amusement isn’t without value, even that which is only for amusement, an “experience” curated to evoke in strangers even  generations removed from the suffering it references, offers something transcendent, or meaningfully “hyperreal.” I will carry this transcendent meaning home with me; the amusement dissipated like vapor.

The difference was never in the “copy,” therefore, but in the “original,” or referent. What does the copy owe to that which it simulates? I think of Mannet S., alone in a small dark room full of dying strangers, finding in it not despair but hope. I think of the sound that kept following me under my own feet, chains that I made for faces I will never know. This is the sound that I will take home.