This video was filmed at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Australasian Society for Classical Studies in February 2024. The Academy of the Humanities is delighted each year to partner with ASCS to deliver this lecture, and thank the event hosts, the Australian Catholic University.
About the lecture
Immersive experiences are big business within today’s creative economy and range from cutting-edge interactive museum experiences and theatrical performances, through to the forms of immersivity facilitated through virtual (VR), augmented (AR), and mixed (XR) reality technologies. Yet the idea of immersion is not new; painting, sculpture, and theatre have all been discussed historically in terms of illusion, realism, and immersion, and textual critics in antiquity also described literature’s ability to create the sensation that a reader or listener was present at the event being described as well.
This lecture will explore how the most innovative forms of immersive experience today can be thought of as a return to, or a refashioning of, a very old fascination with immersion. Dr Cole will introduce examples from ancient literature that we can consider to facilitate immersion, and will explore how this background offers a new way of approaching contemporary immersive experiences. By putting immersion, ancient and modern, into dialogue, we learn something about the benefits, and even dangers of this type of aesthetic experience, and reach towards an understanding of why they are again attracting so much attention.
About Dr Emma Cole
Dr Emma Cole is a classicist and a theatre and performance studies scholar, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and the Royal Historical Society. Her expertise lies in the performance of Greek tragedy in contemporary theatre, particularly in experimental, immersive, and postdramatic adaptations of tragic texts. Dr Cole was an academic consultant with immersive theatre company, Punchdrunk, and worked on the productions Kabeiroi (2017) and The Burnt City (2022-23).
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