Immersive Technology: Towards a Kineikonic Dialogism in Challenging the Myth of the Frame

Abstract

This paper contributes to the introductory study on the sociocultural impact of immersive technology or ImT, in the form of 360° video capture and virtual reality projection. A young technology in the field of visual language, ImT challenges the supremacy of the frame in cinematic mediums—TV, video, film—and, in effect, introduces new notions in visual grammar of the multimodality of moving images, aka the kineikonic mode of media theorist Andrew Burn (2013). Using the dialogic system of Mikhail Bakhtin, this paper situates the place of immersive technology in the historiography of visual language, from the proscenium of the classical theater to cinema, and to virtual reality. In doing so, this study is able to demonstrate how immersive technology becomes the newest expression of mankind’s linguistic resolve to transcend its physical limitations in the field of communication, information production and consumption, knowledge transfer, and dissemination of cultures.