The Pervasive and the Digital: Immersive Worlds in Four Interactive Artworks

This chapter discusses the trajectory of immersive story worlds by considering four distinct interactive artworks. Blast Theory's, A Machine to See With (2010), is a pervasive fictional experience that enables users, through the technology of their mobile phone, to become immersed within a fictional crime scenario across a real geographical setting. Their latter artwork app, Karen (2015), enables a different type of pervasive immersion through interstitial storytelling that incorporates the medium of the user's smartphone into the virtual narrative space. Dennis Del Favero's art project, Scenario (2011), and Extant's Flatland, by contrast, are interactive and immersive stories that take place in digital spaces that interface with the body in unique ways. This chapter will explore each of these artworks through original interviews the author has conducted with each of the artists.