Mat Collishaw’s Thresholds: A Multisensory Journey from Early Photography to Virtual Reality

In 2017, Mat Collishaw presented Thresholds, a cross-reality installation first exhibited at Somerset House, London. Wearing the VR headset, visitors are transported to William Henry Fox Talbot’s 1839 exhibition in Birmingham, encountering his experimental ‘photogenic drawings’. The artwork involves multiple thresholds: entering the installation, donning the VR headset, crossing spatiotemporal boundaries, and inhabiting the image itself as an unframed, immersive environment. This paper situates Collishaw’s artistic research within a broader historical and theoretical framework, arguing that Thresholds, precisely in taking the form of a virtual reenactment of Talbot’s exhibition, serves as a critical reflection on the evolving relationship between image-making and technology – from the birth of photography to the advent of virtual reality.