Beg, Borrow, Steal

Every new medium begins by borrowing. At first it leans on the languages of older forms, then — through experiment, accident, and persistence — it synthesises those borrowings into a grammar of its own. Immersive media stands today where cinema once stood: poised between imitation and invention, testing the edges of what it can be. History gives us precedent. Cinema occupied this same uncertain ground.

Cinema: borrowing and synthesis

The cinematic language we now take for granted — shot/reverse shot, montage, close-up, tracking — did not arrive fully formed. It emerged gradually from the convergence of two older traditions: theatre and photography.

From theatre, cinema inherited mise-en-scène, blocking, and the proscenium’s habit of treating the world as a framed stage. Early performances were exaggerated, scenes unfolded in unbroken time, and the camera was simply a silent spectator.

From photography, it borrowed the rectangular frame and the capacity to isolate fragments of reality. The lens offered composition, realism, and documentary authority — gifts that theatre alone could not supply.

At first, film was essentially theatre captured by a photographic device. Early directors leaned toward theatrical spectacle (Méliès) or photographic actuality (Lumière). But when the two streams met through editing, something new appeared. The collision of staged performance and photographic image created the conditions for a new expressive system. Editing transformed theatre’s continuous time and photography’s frozen instant into a fluid medium capable of leap, condensation, and expansion.

By the time Eisenstein assembled Battleship Potemkin (1925), cinema had discovered that meaning could be constructed not by reproducing theatre or photography, but by combining them — synthesising their affordances into a language neither parent medium possessed.

Immersive media: borrowing and beyond

Immersive media is undergoing a similar phase. But where cinema drew from two parent traditions, XR borrows from at least four.

At present, immersive works are still in the borrowing phase. Some resemble cinematic spectacle with head-tracking, others feel like games with their interactivity pared down, and others lean heavily on theatre with technology as augmentation. HCI undergirds them all, often invisibly.

The next phase, as with cinema, will be synthesis. Only when cinema, games, performance, and HCI collide — fully and without apology — will immersive media develop a native grammar: expressive units that make sense only inside an immersive frame. Presence, agency, and embodiment will become the equivalents of montage — not borrowed techniques, but the medium’s own building blocks.

Speculative candidates

We cannot yet know what will become canonical, but a few candidates glimmer at the edges of practice:

None of these is fixed. All are provisional. But so, too, were cross-cutting and montage in the 1910s — half-experiments, half-accidents that became the language of cinema once they were repeated, named, and refined.

An emerging grammar

Immersive media stands at a similar threshold. The question is not whether a grammar will emerge — it will — but what will determine it. And the answer is the same as it was for cinema: practice. Each new work nudges the medium toward coherence. The language will not be devised by a single auteur but by the accumulated effort of a community — artists, designers, engineers, performers, researchers, curators, and audiences — teaching the medium how to speak.

To live through this moment is a privilege. We are not merely watching a medium find its language. We are participating in its first attempts to form sentences.