UC Santa Barbara

Due to the lack of a working model, immersive events have grown through size and grandeur: Design and opulence being offered instead of curation and specificity. To expand in this way takes capital, and the more capital it takes to produce an event the higher the price of entry. Production cost can easily become overwhelming when the working definition of immersion is drowning the consumer in a property. The few academics who have worked toward systemizing immersion as a technique have done so through favoring of the body. Others have denied that there is any difference to traditional narrativization and privileged the mind. I take a more Spinozian approach, privileging neither but requiring them to work in tandem to assemble the narrative for themselves — in other words, a cognition’s approach. The emotive narrative is an exploration into how story is told in immersive events. By utilizing various theories on cognition, affect, memory, thing, kinesis, and media the way immersion can be accomplished becomes clear. Marrying these theories to the techniques that successfully engross the audience/participant in immersive events unfolds a system of storytelling with the emotive as its key operative. The formation of a narrative is experienced through the individual senses and requires the totality of the audiences’ mind and body. It is not a passive process but one that requires the whole person, their pervious experiences, and current stimulus. The audience members or as I term them, audience/participants, as they are fulfilling both roles simultaneously are not simply material embedded into the production or a body that the production acts upon. They are active in every element of the event through this process. Using this approach this dissertation explores a myriad of immersive events including theatre, dance, fine dining, and media activations. It also takes time to explore immersion during the time of the Covid 19 pandemic shutdowns and how that changed the immersive landscape. The goal of this dissertation, after all, is to examine how the emotive narrative is structured and put into use. These techniques are task-based movement and game, food as story, embodied advertising, and the emotive narrative at a distance (virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed media).