From "Gaze" to "Interaction": The Paradigm Shift in Aesthetic Appreciation of Immersive Digital Art
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.64504/artsappreciation.v1i1.885Keywords:
interaction, immersive digital art, embodied appreciation, paradigm shiftAbstract
Since the twentieth century, the "gaze" has functioned as a core category of aesthetic appreciation, predicated on the unidirectionality of vision, the stillness of the spectator, and the fixity of time and space — a framework central to analytical traditions from Laura Mulvey's gaze theory to Guy Debord's critique of the spectacle. The emergence of digital immersive art — encompassing virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), embodied interactive installations, and holographic immersive spaces — is now systematically dismantling this contemplative gaze paradigm, propelling aesthetic appreciation toward an "interaction" paradigm characterized by embodied interactivity, dynamic co-construction, and perceptual multimodality. Drawing on Oliver Grau's history of immersive art, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's embodied phenomenology, Claire Bishop's criticism of participatory art, and Helmut Leder's model of aesthetic information processing, this paper systematically compares the fundamental differences between the "gaze paradigm" and the "interaction paradigm" across four dimensions — perceptual structure, bodily role, spatiotemporal experience, and meaning production — and proposes a Three-Layer Interaction Model of Immersive Appreciation (TLIMIA) that distinguishes three strata of immersive digital art appreciation: a perceptual immersion layer, an embodied interaction layer, and a social co-construction layer. The paper further argues that this paradigm shift is neither a simple negation of the gaze tradition nor an inevitable elevation of aesthetic depth, but rather simultaneously opens multiple entry points for appreciation while generating new tensions around critical reflection, deep reading, and slow contemplation. The findings carry direct reference value for the design of immersive arts education, museum curatorial practice, and the methodological construction of digital art criticism.
References
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