José Luis de Vicente | Cultural Heritage. Goverment of Catalonia.

JOSE LUÍS DE VICENTE

Cultural researcher and exhibition curator specialising in culture, art and technology

José Luis de Vicente develops projects at the crossroads of technology, social innovation, art and design. Since 2012, he has been the curator of Sónar+D, the Congress of Digital Culture and Creative Technologies of Barcelona’s Sónar Festival. He is also a member of the curatorial team of Manchester’s FutureEverything. Some of his most recent projects include holding the post of co-director of Tentacular, a new festival of Critical Technologies and Digital Adventures in Matadero (Madrid), and curating Llum BCN, Barcelona’s festival of light.
He has also been collaborating with the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) for more than ten years now and recently worked on developing the BETA exhibition series by curating the shows “Big Bang Data” (2014, on a world tour until 2018) and “After the End of the World” (2017, CCCB).

The cultural logic of the immersive
An adjective has become widespread in the communication texts of all manner of cultural proposals over the past five years: “immersive”. Whether in new exhibition formats, audiovisual or interactive experiences, new ways of staging theatrical or musical activities, the “immersive” has become synonymous with so-called innovation and an added value aiming to inject new blood into established formats and languages. But we lack a standardised use of the term. What do we mean when we talk about the immersive and what are the opportunities and dangers of this code?