The immersive performance of visual poetry: the result of a quest for a renewed literary-immersive art experience where the audience, as receiver/viewer/reader, is immersed together in an immersive poetic experience of image, sound, language, and spatial experiences : the immersive performance poetry of Philip Meersman: a multidimensional exploration

This doctoral research investigates how poetry transforms when it moves beyond the printed page and unfolds within immersive, spatial, and performative environments. Grounded in his artistic practice, Philip Meersman develops an integrated theoretical and practice-based framework that reconceives poetry as a polyphonic, multisensory, and spatial art form. Central to the research is a redefinition of poetry as a score existing in a five-fold modality—written, oral, read, aural, and performative—operating simultaneously and interdependently within shared spaces of perception and attention. The core essay articulates this poetics through perspectives drawn from visual poetry, performance studies, semiotics, narratology, and neuroaesthetics. Particular emphasis is placed on co-speech gesture, visual prosody, typographic space, temporality, and collective reception. Planetaria are proposed as a privileged site for literary immersion, offering scale, co-presence, and cognitive focus that distinguish them from individualized headset-based virtual reality. The poetry collection Oceanus Refertus: Microplastic Paradise on a Slip of Paper functions as the poetic counterpart to the essay. In this volume, the theoretical premises of the research are enacted through a polyphonic, spatially conceived, and ecologically engaged body of work, addressing themes of language, memory, mobility, and environmental precarity. The poster serves as a visual-performative interface that mediates between text, space, and audience. Taken together, the essay, the poetry book, and the poster demonstrate how poetry can operate as an embodied, collective, and critically reflective practice within a post-truth cultural condition. The research positions poetry not merely as a textual artefact, but as a spatial event in which language, body, image, and technology co-produce meaning.