On Sept. 6, the Gallery Art Bar in Urbana hosted the Immersion Festival, a two-day event dedicated to honoring the work of various artists in multiple artistic mediums.
The event drew a crowd from across the country to see artists’ work hung on or projected on the walls within the bar.
Artist Christopher Konopka attended the event and is a member of the Schwwaaa collective based in Boston. Schwwaaa has been together for 10 years and has completed various projects in areas that range between software development, social hacking and engineering, as well as art and advertising.
“The specific focus (of Schwwaaa) is a lot of, I guess you could say, social engineering and understanding the baseline of what emotional concepts are in media and how we take those and better understand them in our modern sense,” Konopka said.
Konopka was most excited about reuniting as a community after the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Konopka, many of the attendees were also members of different collectives based in various cities around the country.
Get The Daily Illini in your inbox!
“We haven’t been able to be together since, really, a pandemic, so we’re really excited to live together for a little bit — that’s a big part of it — and also be able to create together in a new way,” Konopka said.
Jonah Weisskopf is the owner of Gallery Art Bar and one of the event organizers. The bar was opened in September 2023, and offers classic and craft cocktails, according to their online menu. Aside from the wide variety of alcoholic drinks, they also have an extensive list of non-alcoholic beverages. While functioning as a bar, the location also makes for a functional arts venue.
“This is kind of the reason we almost built the bar a full-immersive projection on the interior,” Weisskopf said. “This event kind of highlights that technology.”
At the event, not all of the art featured was visual. Speakers were set up all around the bar to play music, and a DJ booth was set up in the outside patio area to entertain attendees.
Event attendee Eli Pechman traveled from his home of Glendale, Calif., to attend this event. Pechman owns a small synthesizer company that builds the same equipment that many of the performers used.
Pechman is interested in audio and visual technology but specifically enjoys modular synthesizers for video. Pechman said a modular synthesizer for video is outdated technology that only existed for a few decades before it was quickly replaced. He is specifically interested in the untried aspects of this outdated technology.
“It’s a very deep and unexplored territory,” Pechman said. “There is a lot of creativity in that universe, and also, because there aren’t a lot of opportunities to make money from it, the people that you meet who are interested in it are really passionate.”
Pechman was most excited about seeing and connecting with new people at the event. He notably wanted to see new music acts being performed by people he had never met.
“I’m excited to see people play who I’ve never seen before, who are local talent from this community,” Pechman said. “It seems like a very eclectic sort of show where you might get one kind of music or musical act followed by something that’s very different afterward.”
